Based in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, Stone Pitt Holiday Park caters to caravan and self-catering holiday cottages with their 2 on-site cottages and have 36 caravan and touring pitches. Claire Morris, who owns Stone Pitt was struggling with her current website and had been stung more than once with so-called web designers building her website. Her current website at the time was doing nothing for her business and was struggling to attract any online bookings at all.
She had also attempted to hire a photographer to come and take some nice photos of the park for her website and general business promotion, but the images that came back were poor and not the quality that Claire was expecting.
She didn’t know what to do next as everything she was trying wasn’t working and people were letting her down!
As a last effort to get her business moving online, Claire got in touch with our partners over at Pembrokeshire Photography and Skycam Wales to see if they could help her with photography.
Bev at SkyCam Wales advised Claire to get in touch with us at Pixel Yeti Media and the rest, as they say, was history. We met with Claire and talked through what she was looking for with her website.
Claire needed to make her business stand out with Pembrokeshire being a very competitive area for holidaying throughout the year.
The holiday park is in a great location and within 5 miles of everything you would want for an amazing family holiday. Less than a mile down the road is Folly Farm Zoo where, if you stayed on the park you could hear the lions raw of a morning! Where else are you going to get this from a holiday in Wales?…..
But Claire’s current website was not doing her fantastic holiday park any justice, it was outdated, static and plain with poor images and was not responsive to people viewing on mobile browsers. This website needed scrunching up, throwing in the bin and starting again from scratch!
There were plenty of amazing selling points to her park, it was immaculately clean with beautiful flower baskets and wooden carvings from fallen trees, and it was bang in the middle of all the places tourists like to visit when they stay in Pembrokeshire. But you didn’t find any of this information on her current tired and outdated website.
Claire was also paying a company nearly £600 a year for a booking system for her website that was letting her down. Not only did she not know how many visitors she was getting to her website, but visitors were also frustrated when they could not view any availability on the park. Website visitors had to enter dates in the hope that they would return with a booking option. It was like playing on the slot machines and hoping it would land on a jackpot!
We had to get down to business and help Claire and her business out.
We build all our websites for a purpose, to make our clients money! Nobody wants a website just to take up space on the internet, which was exactly what Claire’s site at the time was doing.
Our checklist went as follows;
We built the website like all our websites on the WordPress platform so it was responsive to mobile browsers and easy for Claire to keep updating with news and blog posts to promote the park and tap into the local area. This was also linked to her Facebook page where all the content she creates on her new website will automatically post to her Facebook page to help drive past visitors that previously liked the parks page, back to the new website and encourage repeat bookings.
We also had to give visitors a better experience when viewing park availability and booking their stay. The user experience is important to us when designing any website, but the current booking system that Claire was paying for was far from easy or intuitive to use.
We replaced this with a booking system that was responsive and easy to understand, making the booking process easy for visitors. We also set up Stripe payment gateways which is the cheapest and easiest way of taking card payments online.
We also made sure that Claire would know exactly how many visitors came to her website and made sure all data was tracked by setting up Google Analytics. Now she would know how many visitors came to her website, where they have come from on the internet and what they are doing page by page on the website.
It makes finding any issues with your website a lot easier in the future if you know what people are doing and if you have some facts and figures to go by.