Redesigning a struggling holiday cottage website & improving the SEO
No. 66 is a Haworth holiday cottage based right on the main street in this highly popular tourist destination near Keighley in West Yorkshire
The existing website was a WordPress site but, as we seem to keep on discovering, while WordPress is a really well designed modular web design software, many developers create sites in a very unusual, non-modular way that causes problems later.
In this case the menu was “fixed” to the left hand side, and because of the unusual way it had been built the menu was disappearing behind the logo, the image slider was blurred, distorted, and not rendering properly, and the site just would not rank in Google.
The easiest solution was to rebuild the site using Elementor and WordPress, incorporate a booking system tied into their existing (3rd party) system, and to make sure the website was properly built and SEO’d for Google AND designed for users as well.
Our objective was to help the site rank better (it’s now on page 1 in a very competitive niche), to make sure the site functioned properly, and to increase visitor engagement.
To aid with visitor interaction, and therefore conversion rate (increased bookings) we added a few simple, yet effective elements into the site.
Previously the “fixed” menu to the left was taking up a huge area on the screen, we moved the menu to the top and made it “sticky” so when you scroll, the menu is always accessible.
Additionally we made the contact details sticky as well, so that they can always be seen on the page, but they take up very little space.
We also added some moving elements in the header and lower down the page.
People have a tendency to skim the page and miss important information, so we used icons and text to “slide in” this information to catch your eye.
This resulted in a better looking, better performing website that ranks in Google.