Dalmonds Barns
Visit Websitewww.dalmondsbarns.co.ukDalmonds Barns is a self-catering holiday company with six barn conversion cottages, located just outside of Hertford on a working farm, offering four star accommodation to people looking to escape to the countryside.
Completion Date:
March 2015
Operates:
HertfordHertfordshire
Client Feedback:
"The designs have been excellent and have used the latest technology always at an affordable price"
We have used Advanced Web Designs since we first started our holiday accommodation business 6 years ago and feel Richard and his team have made a significant contribution to our success.
The designs have been excellent and have used the latest technology always at an affordable price. Advanced Web Designs are easily accessible and helpful when there is a problem and difficulties are dealt with quickly and efficiently.
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The Brief
Back in 2007, the owner of Dalmonds Barns approached us to develop their first ever website. The brief was to create an informative website to promote their barn conversions to people looking for a rural holiday in Hertfordshire, and to provide separate and detailed information about each of the unique properties available to rent.
Despite it being an early technology, the website was to offer a combination of video and photographs, allowing visitors to see exactly what they could expect from their stay.
The design of the website needed to consider future growth, as there was a long-term plan to convert more barns into holiday lets.
How We Responded
We came up with a design which projected a feel of the countryside, combined with a trustworthy and professional family run business, combining a traditional feel with easy navigation around the website.
To ensure the individual properties area of the website was scalable, we created main link to a page which provided information common to all the barns, with image lead navigation to each of the individual properties. This enabled us to ensure that no matter how many additional properties were added in the future, the unique information for each property could be easily located under a single link from the main website navigation.
As initially planned, more barns were converted over the years and added to the website, and as with the initial properties, we took the internal photos and filmed a new video clips.
The initial website successfully promoted the holiday cottages for eight years before we recommended the client may benefit form an updated website. Our suggestion was for a ‘responsive’ website with a fully content management system, together with additional features you will now find on the new website, such as an availability calendar.
To ensure none of the search engine optimisation benefits from the existing website that had been built up over the year were not lost, before going live with the new website we carried out a process of pointing the page URL’s of the existing website to those of the new site, therefore protecting the valuable ‘link juice’ used by search engines such as Google.