Devine Caribbean
Devine Caribbean Property and Housing Services rents out a collection of houses in Residential Villa Park Fontein. This still-growing park is located in the rural part of Curacao, but still near to all possible comforts. The private villas are available for short-stay as well as long-stay visitors.

The website of Devine Caribbean has a clean, no-frills design with many pictures of Curacao and the villas themselves. On the site visitors can see whether or not the houses are available and make a reservation straightaway.

The pictures of the houses in the site were made by Daphne Photography and the texts (Dutch & English) were done by Elaine Marchena.

HSMAI Curacao
Since 2006 Curacao has its own chapter of the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association Internal (HSMAI) as the first Caribbean chapter. Since that time they have been very busy with organising events, workshops and discounts for their members. The board of HSMAI understands the added value of the internet and wanted a new website to better show this.

HSMAI's new website combines several techniques and functionalities in one. It has a blog, automatically loads HSMAI's three official Twitter feeds, allows people to sign up for the newsletter using AJAX and it uses modal dialogs for the photo gallery. The design of the website is clean and modern with obviously Caribbean touches. The puzzle flash animations are made to be slightly disconcerting and give visitors an 'aha moment'.

Heineken Regatta Curacao 2009
On 6, 7 & 8 November 2009 Curacao will host the second Heineken Regatta Curacao. The Regatta is three days of races in all kinds of watersports, parties, waterside activities and events. Even though this is only the second Curacao Regatta it is quickly becoming a signature event. We made last year's website and were asked to do it again.

This year's website had to be bigger and better than the previous one with more action and more interaction. For now, most of this activity is centered on the homepage. The promo-video is integrated in the design, the latest pictures are loaded in a flash animation, news and events are updated instantly when they're published and we implemented Facebook Connect on the site. We also created a custom Twitter widget to display the organisation's latest tweets as well as what other people are saying about the Regatta. Over the coming months we will be adding functionality to the site so keep your eye on it.

You can follow Heineken Regatta Curacao on twitter here: @RegattaCuracao

Floris Suite Hotel Curacao
The Floris Suite Hotel is the first design hotel on Curacao. It's an all-suite hotel designed by the Dutch designer Jan des Bouvrie. Floris is centrally located in Piscadera and close to Hook's Hut beach and restaurant. Besides leisure guests they also focus on the weddings- and meetings markets.

Floris Suite Hotel's previous website was clean and minimalistic (in style with the hotel) and has been active for a long time because it was good. This new website uses a similar clean look but has a stronger focus on usability and SEO.

The texts for Floris Suite Hotel's website were written by Elaine Marchena and the photographs are by Daphne Photography.

Curacao Apartments and Small Hotels Association (CASHA)
CASHA is a local association of apartments and small hotels. Its members adhere to a set of quality-, safety- and service guarantees. Together with the Curacao Tourist Board they work towards improving the tourism sector on Curacao.

CASHA's former website was over due for a redesign and wasn't performing as well as it could in the search engines. We redid the entire site, made their member directory searchable and added some cool flash- and AJAX applications.

Howard Johnson Plaza Hotel & Casino
The Howard Johnson Plaza Hotel is a business- and leisure hotel in the middle of Willemstad. Their location and amenities make this a bustling hotel where there's always something to do.

After going through a full refurbishment of their rooms, lobby and restaurant they needed a refurbished website as well.

Howard Johnson's new website is minimalistic and very straightforward. They wanted the design to focus on their corporate identity with a minimum of frills and only the most pertinent information. The result is a very open, fresh site.

After the launch of this website, a third party has been tasked with maintenance by the client and design changes have been made.

Curacao NOW
The Curacao Tourist Board is running a campaign in the US called Curacao NOW. People that take advantage of this campaign get $140 F&B credit, an airfare rebate of $100 and many other deals. This same campaign also ran last year and it was so successful that it is being rerun in 2009.

We replaced last year's landing page with this mini-site. There was too much content for the landing page and the marketing people wanted to sell the destination more with compelling images and clear paths to the Visitor Pass and the airfare rebate form.

Academy Hotel Curacao
The Academy Hotel Curacao is an initiative of the Curacao Hospitality Training Foundation (CHTF) in cooperation with local tourism & hospitality partners as well as the local hospitality schools. The idea of this small-scale hotel is to provide the schools with a location for internships and the hospitality students with a real-life training environment. The Academy Hotel will be run almost entirely by students during their internships and will have its official opening February 17, 2009.

We already built a pre-site for the Academy Hotel but now the official commercial website is online. We kept the design simple and playful with a straightforward structure and fresh colors to reflect the fact that this is a student-run hotel. Although the aim of the website is commercial we brought back the students on almost every page to give it a personal touch and make it less a run-of-the-mill hotel website.

The Academy Hotel website uses the CMS Joomla 1.5 and a few small flash tricks. The content (text and pictures) comes mostly from the students themselves.

JaCuracao
Gettting married in unusual locations abroad is becoming more popular by the month in Europe and the US. One of the more popular countries for people to get hitched is Curacao. Wedding locations like the Avila Hotel and Hook's Hut need to be booked well in advance now and new wedding planners are popping up like hotcakes. However, there was no magazine or website about this subject, until now.

Our strategic partner BKCC has added a magazine about getting married on Curacao to his list of publications and we built the portal to go with the magazine. The website features articles from the magazine as well as unique 'online-only' content and we will add to these with more information, photography, visitor input and functionality. During the coming weeks we will be adding to the content and we will work on more functionality.

The JaCuracao website uses the CMS Joomla 1.5 with several extra templates, components and modules as well as a lot of integrated Flash technology. The design for this website was made by Folkert (intern at DGF).

Kura Hulanda Resorts
Kura Hulanda Resorts consists of Hotel Kura Hulanda Spa & Casino and Lodge Kura Hulanda & Beach Club. The hotel is 'a boutique village experience' in the center of Willemstad and the lodge is a 'secluded island getaway' in the extreme west of Curacao. Both hotels are members of Leading Small Hotels of the World, meeting the high standards of this group.

The website for Kura Hulanda Resorts is one of the first websites we made as Dragonfly Media and in the difference between the previous one and this one you can see how much we've grown and developed as a design company.

This new website is very visual with many beautiful high-res pictures, a clear information structure and precisely the images and information that visitors need to be wowed ánd informed. We also revisited the Search Engine Optimization of the website and are confident that it will perform even better than the old website did.

For this website we used the CMS Joomla 1.5 with assorted components for dynamic menus, photo galleries and the slide effects on the small photographs. We even built a custom module to make the hero-images and flash animations dynamic.

Curacao Tourist Board corporate site
The Curacao Tourist Board has multiple websites for specific tourism-related niches (carnival, diving, culture, etc.). Besides these they also have a corporate site meant to inform their partners in tourism as well as the local population. This website features information about the organization, tourism statistics, investment information and a large section for community information.

The idea for this new website was to stick with the look & feel of curacao.com but with a more local touch. The CTB wanted to be able to update the content themselves so we used the content management system they already use for curacao.com (Sitecore). The last few weeks they have worked frantically to get all the information in the website so it could go live before the start of Siman di Turismo (tourism week) on September 21, 2008.

An interesting sidenote with this website is that the CTB uploaded most of this year's editions of their local televistion program "Ban Papia Turismo" to YouTube. They linked all these videos from the website in a separate section so people can now also see the televistion program online.

Bistro le Clochard
Bistro Le Clochard is one of the most venerable restaurant on Curacao. It was named after the vagrants who used to inhabit the cellars the restaurant now occupies but the current clientele is far from your typical bum. The restaurant's combination of French/Swiss cuisine with Caribbean elements and its great location in Otrobanda's Rif Fort have both contributed to making Bistro Le Clochard a must-visit restaurant when you're on the island.

Bistro (as it is commonly called) needed a new, fresh look and feel. Their website's previous, two years old, design did not do justice to what they're doing with food and ambiance. The new design takes the history of the restaurant as a starting point and combines this with modern elements. The new texts and photographs complete the picture as a whole.

The photographs in this website were made by Daphne Photography and the texts were written by Elaine Marchena.

Update: after an initial period where this website lived as a static website, we rebuilt it in the CMS Joomla 1.5 and now it is fully self-updatable by the people of the Bistro themselves.

Hospitality In Projects (HIP)
HIP is a young, dynamic team of hospitality professionals who help their clients with event management and hospitality training. With all the new hospitality businesses starting up in Curacao there is a serious shortage of qualified people to run and work in all these businesses. One of the answers to this problem is Hospitality In Projects. They can set up a hospitality business, provide interim management, train people and organize all types of events for their clients.

HIP needed a small, functional website with a creative look and a 'different' feel from just any website. The result is an attractive site that invites people to look again and which gives visitors an idea of the creative spirits that the people of HIP are.

Cas Abao Beach, Watersports and Shop
Cas Abao Beach is one of the most beautiful beaches of Curacao. It has been one of those forgotten pearls for a long time, but now with all the hospitality projects in the neighborhood two local investors have taken it upon themselves to further develop this beach.

This new website is the website for the watersports activities and the shop on the beach. We got the logo and some images from the developers and had to build a website based on that. The result is a very fresh, colorful website which really captures the beauty of Cas Abao Beach with a playful twist.

Zanzibar Beach and Restaurant
Zanzibar is one of the hippest beaches on Curacao. Located at Jan Thiel (in the east of Curacao) it is perfectly situated next to three popular resorts and several dive spots. This area is also the center of many of the new hospitality projects on Curacao so they can expect a lot of new guests soon.

Zanzibar's new website needed to better represent the new management's idea of what this unique beach and restaurant are about. The design needed to reflect the combination of a tropical island, contemporary European style and an East-African village. Besides creating a new design we also restructured the information on the site to better promote the many services they offer and to make sure they rank better in the search engines.

The beautiful new photographs used in the website are made by Eef Photography. Updates to the website are handled by a third party.

Hook's Hut Beach Bar & Restaurant
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.

Tradewind Villas
Luxury accommodations has long been an under-developed part of Curacao's tourism policies. Quantity was important, quality less so. But since a few years more and more tourists request high quality accommodations and the market responds by building, and renting out, more luxurious villas.

Villa Tropical and, soon to be finished, Villa Kon-Tiki are examples of this trend. Tradewind Villas (owner of these two villas) wanted a website with a luxurious look & feel, combined with a homely atmosphere. The idea should be that people should feel at home, but a more lavish version of home than normal. The result is now live.

Caribbean Sea Sports
Caribbean Sea Sports is a PADI 5* divecenter located at the Curacao Marriott Beach Resort. As an organisation it is innovative, creative and forward-thinking. We met Tom Zeck (owner of Caribbean Sea Sports) after the first meeting of HSMAI's Curacao chapter. He told us that he needed a new website which would score well in Google and the other search engines.

So, with his new website we paid extra attention to onsite SEO, gave him some social media tools (blog, newsletter) and we are also working on some offsite SEO. We really like this project because Tom understands the value of internet marketing and is willing to invest in it. This new website is the first step to getting a good return on his investment.