About the client
Who they are
Coastal Escapes Shoalhaven is a boutique holiday home management and co-hosting business on the NSW South Coast. Kiralee Whitehead looks after a handpicked portfolio of homes from Callala Bay and Jervis Bay down through Lake Conjola, Mollymook and Kioloa, and the whole business is built on knowing every one of them personally rather than running a volume rental book.
That is two audiences on one website. A guest wants to see the homes, work out which one sleeps their group and get on with booking. An owner is making a much slower decision, and wants to know who would be looking after a house they are not living in. The homes were already listed and taking bookings. What was missing was somewhere that showed them together, as one portfolio, with a business standing behind them.
The solution
What Webics delivered
Webics designed and built the site on WordPress, around the properties themselves.
Every home is a proper record rather than a page someone has to rebuild by hand. It carries its own photography, the beds, baths and how many it sleeps, the features people actually choose on, and a direct link through to book. Add a home and it appears in the portfolio, on its destination page and on the home page, without anyone touching a layout. The properties page filters the way people shop for a holiday: by where they want to be, by what the house has, and by how many of them are coming.
Underneath that sits a page for every destination the portfolio covers, from Jervis Bay and Callala Bay to Mollymook, Milton and Lake Conjola. Almost nobody searches for a management company. They search for somewhere to stay in a particular town, weeks out and usually from a phone, so each destination page is written for the place it covers rather than repeated from a template. That is where the site earns its traffic.
The owners' side of the business runs through the site rather than sitting in one buried page, because someone deciding who to hand a house to reads everything before they pick up the phone.
The design was built out from the watercolour badge the business already had, into a palette taken from the water it was painted from: deep teal, sage and warm cream, with a high contrast serif carrying the headings. A small, personally managed portfolio has to look like one, not like a listings site.
Webics set up Google Analytics and Search Console at launch so enquiries can be counted rather than guessed at, and hosts and maintains the site.
