Dragonfly Media Curacao

We’re churning out websites like crazy these days. After a short lull during the summer holidays it seems like every company on the island wants a new website before the end of the year. We’re happy to oblige of course :D

Last week we launched two new websites. The first one was for a local magazine for management professionals; Coaching Magazine. We modified Wordpress to be used as a content management system and they are using it effectively to add content to the website themselves. For this project we worked together, again, with Bas Kok Creatieve Communicatie. He took care of the design and we turned his design into a fully-functional website.

The second launch of last week was the redesign of a Curacao beach and restaurant; Zanzibar. This beachbar and restaurant is one of the hippest places on Curacao and they wanted their new website to accurately reflect the unique look&feel of the place. Their old website was pretty cool, but it was all flash and they were doing terrible in Google and the likes. Their new website should remedy this.

The official blurbs are on our web design clients page.

The Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA) three-day Caribbean Small Hotels Retreat on Barbados started yesterday. During this retreat owners and marketers of small hotels throughout the Caribbean will talk about subjects relevant to their business.

Yesterday, Billy Jonckheer (long-time marketer from Curacao) spoke about how hotels with a small budget for marketing should spend their dollars. His two most important points were that they should spend more money on their websites (and marketing those) and that they should make sure that they target their niche market. You can read the full article on nationnews.com

Yesterday’s internet marketing presentation for the HSMAI Curacao Chapter was, in our book, a success! People were hanging from the rafters and were pushing for attention (well, that’s actually not true - no rafters in the room ;) - but the room was packed to the brim).

Bo started off the presentation with an introduction to what DGF is and what we do. She talked about some of our design clients and introduced little old me. The idea of the presentation was to give people an idea of what internet marketing is and to talk about some of the basic concepts in SEO. I talked way too long and finished just in time, but it looked like people remained interested throughout the presentation (which was very cool). Read the rest of this entry »

Coming thursday we will give a presentation on Internet Marketing (or: How you can understand what your internet marketer is talking about) for the Curacao chapter of HSMAI.

HSMAI is an international association of sales and marketing people in the hospitality industry. The first caribbean chapter was founded last year in Curacao and the idea is that its members learn more about their profession through events (like this presentation), conferences, the main HSMAI website and their magazine.

The hospitality industry of Curacao is a real growth sector and new hotels are being built left and right. This is good for the island (provided there are enough tourists and means for them of coming here, of course), but it also means that they need to work harder on marketing their properties because of the extra competition. This is less relevant for a Marriott or a Hilton for whom much of the marketing is handled centrally from the US, but it is very relevant for the many independent hotels on Curacao (Kura Hulanda, Floris, Avila, etcetera). Read the rest of this entry »

Our latest and freshest website design is the new website of Hook’s Hut. Hook’s Hut is a laid-back, relaxed beach bar on Curacao near the Marriott, Hilton and Floris Suite hotels. During the day Hook’s Hut caters to the people on the family-friendly beach and around dinner-time the beach chairs are cleared away for guests to have dinner on the beach.

They have bands (jazz, merengue, salsa, calypso) four evenings per week and their happy hours are famous on the island. Hook’s Hut is also a great location for a romantic wedding (pictures) or for any other kind of party.

As Caribbean pirates are the main theme of Hook’s Hut the website needed to use this theme for the design. On the other hand, the beach bar can also be a very romantic place (hence the weddings) so we also incorporated a romantic touch. Oscar and Jerry (one of our interns) worked on this design together and you can be the judge if they succeeded in combining the two concepts.

Right now the website is only available in Dutch, but we’re working with the client on getting the English version on-line as well.

Tradewind Villas is a small complex of two luxury Curacao villas which are available for short-term rent. They are still working on the finishing touches of the accommodations, but it looks like it is going to be a fantastic property.

The villas are located in Bottelier which is an area in the south-east of Curacao (Banda Arriba) and from there you are just a stone’s throw away from some of the most popular beaches, restaurants and hiking areas.

The website is relatively small (6 pages per language, 2 languages), but we have a good feeling about its chances in the search engines for its most important keywords. It will be a question of gaining links to it and tweaking it over time. As the domain name is as fresh as the website it will probably suffer from the sandbox effect for a while, but that’s nothing a few good links can’t fix.

Recently we talked about the opportunities in Latin America (or better: the Latino market) for internet companies. Curacao is ideally positioned to do business in Latin America; not only because of its geographical location, but also for the fact that it has a stable government and there are strong ties with Holland.

The CIFA (Curaçao International Financial Services Association)  recognizes these opportunities and is organizing a conference from September 6 to 9. The title of the conference is the “Wealth and Business Preservation conference” and its aim is to show the benefits that Curacao can offer to so-called high net worth individuals for living and doing business in Curacao.

More information about the conference can be found on CIFA’s (Spanish) conference page. There is also conference information available in English, but the conference itself will be focused on Latin America and therefore the official language will be Spanish.

Recently we launched a new website for Sentro Orto Fisiko Korsou (SOFK). SOFK is a center for high-tech prostheses and orthotics run by Tom de Windt and his wife Mieke. Tom is the prosthesist and Mike is a physiotherapist. These people give hope to people who have lost a limb or have a physical defect (by birth or by accident) by giving them the means to cope with their problem. We are very proud that we could help them with their website.

For some time now I have been working on the website curacao.com. As the work I do for this site is apart from Dragonfly Media and as it is more technical in nature I never blogged about it here before. However, lately it is starting to become more interesting to blog about because the Tourist Board (owner of curacao.com) has started up an SEO make-over campaign.

The Tourist Board and I have been talking about it for some time now and they fully realize that optimizing your website is one of the most effective ways of getting more visitors (on-line AND off-line). The SEO report I made for them outlined a set of actions which would help in getting better rankings for the targeted key phrases. Once we have pruned the list of keywords and phrases to target, we will start implementing the suggestions.

The Curacao Tourist Board has graciously allowed me to report on the results in this blog so you can expect periodical updates here about the status of this campaign.

Disclaimer in the interest of full disclosure: Dragonfly Media and I have no authority whatsoever when it comes to the contents of curacao.com and associated websites. Any questions regarding the contents of and/or advertising on curacao.com should be directed to the Curacao Tourist Board or the companies/people that they have charged with authority in this respect.

The sad thing about making websites is that they are, by definition, temporary. At the speed the internet is moving, you just know that the website you made yesterday is not good enough anymore tomorrow. But then again, this is marketing and that’s the way it works. You need to move forward and renew yourself, and your company, every day to be able to stay ahead of the curve.

When you redesign, reorganize or rebuild a website the URLs of the individual pages will usually change as well. This becomes a problem when you think of all the links into your website and the link juice you’re throwing away if you don’t redirect these links in an SEO-friendly way. Sure, you can catch the errors people are getting and redirect them to the proper page or your homepage with links or JavaScript, but these methods don’t work well for the search engines. This is where 301 redirects come into play. Read the rest of this entry »