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FLASH INSERTS AND ANIMATED GIFS were used throughout to bring the site to life.
The design included an ADVERTISING BANNER at the top of each page to highlight what's on offer, and also to leave the option open for the lodge to sell advertising space to camping equipment companies, etc, as there is a large number of their target market looking at the site every day.
To get the site to the top of the search engine rankings, a LINK-BUILDING CAMPAIGN was conducted, using specialised software. Detailed STATISTICS were provided by Statcounter, one of the world's most trusted webstats services. The site was MONITORED by SiteUptime to ensure that it was always visible to customers.
Surfing is one of the main attractions, and a surf report was included - this UPDATES automatically every day. Other features of the site included automatic TRANSLATIONS into several languages (these are visible on search engines, so for instance a German could search for "SURFENDE LEKTION " and still find the site), an integrated GOOGLE MAP, as well as links to SOCIAL NETWORKING sites such as Facebook and Youtube.
TRADITIONAL MEDIA items included 2 brochures, an ad, and posters to stick up around the hostel to advertise tours and daytrips - and to use as flyers for distribution around the well-developed backpacking network.
Also included was an E-POSTCARD, which guests could email to friends and family. The Coffee Shack has an extensive library of photos sent in by guests, and the best of these were used in the postcard. The thinking was that the more branded items that get sent out to the world, the better.
Overall, the communications objective was to make the place look so exciting and like so much fun that website visitors couldn't wanted to get there. That, and its Google rankings, appears to have worked, in the year after its website became highly-ranked on Google, the Coffee Shack reportedly had a tremendous increase in visitors, and their competitors were complaining about a serious drop in business. The design had to stand out in people's memories amongst the many tourism websites that they look at when planning their holidays, so I tried to make the site as much of a visual experience as possible - it is more colourful than most, and has many more pictures. The images are also much bigger, so that viewers get the message straight away without having to click on small images before seeing larger ones, as is usually the case. Despite the number and sizes of the images, the website loads quickly and smoothly (especially with broadband connections in the US, Europe, Australia and South Africa, where the target market comes from).
THE COFFEE SHACK
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