Services: Content, Web design
The brief
Sea Oats is a luxury home in the Bahamas, owned by a UK family business, Jemson Luxury Homes. They rent Sea Oats to carefully vetted holidaymakers, predominantly from the UK and US.
Jemson Luxury Homes approached us to create a brand identity and website for Sea Oats, so they could market it independently.
This was an important step to enable them to be less dependent upon commission-hungry third-party booking websites. The new branding would also help to emphasise the high-end nature of this holiday home.
The solution
It was clear from the outset that the photography would be the key component for this website, showcasing the beautiful Sea Oats property.
We designed the website to take full advantage of these images, the homepage starting with glossy, full-width images. The photography is displayed liberally throughout the website.
With such rich photographs it was important that the design of the website didn’t “fight” with it. For their branding, we opted for an understated blue and white colour scheme, with a clean logo design which could be applied across other marketing materials.
In writing the text for the website we wanted to convey the luxury of this fabulous location. However, it was also important that visitors can easily find the information they need, such as the list of facilities.
The reservations page incorporates a booking calendar which uses a feed from Sea Oat’s VRBO listing to display the latest availability.
The result
The Sea Oats website showcases the best of this holiday home and has enabled the owners to achieve more direct bookings, particularly from repeat customers.
All our websites are constructed to be search-engine-friendly and this has given Sea Oats some SEO success, even without this being a specific target for our work. It is top of Google for searches for “Sea Oats Elbow Cay” and “Sea Oats Bahamas”. This is particularly notable because it appears above the VRBO listing for the property and, importantly, above listings for another property of the same name.
The depth of content on the website has also helped them to rank on page 1 of Google for “holiday research” terms such as “Elbow Cay history” and “activities on Elbow Cay”.
The upshot of this is that a significant proportion of visitors to the website come from organic search (eg Google searches) rather than people going directly to the website.
Jemson Luxury Homes have since put their trust in us to create two further websites, one as their company website and another for a property in France.
Mike Boniface
Owner
Open Door Digital did a great job of giving us a website that does exactly what we need. And their support with updates and changes has been brilliant, they make everything really easy.