Easy vacation rental website platform to showcase your own properties
Read more about the Key Lime Vacation Rentals story here.
For this site, we crafted a mobile-optimized, fast-loading site, using photos Joe has taken over the years at his properties. The photos have a “we vacationed here” snapshot vibe. We also bumped up the ooh factor on the home page with inexpensive stock photography in a really easy-to-use slider tool. For locations such as Joe’s, using stock is pretty easy because the Keys are well-photographed and stock photos are available for purchase at places like iStock Photo, among other sites.
Joe didn’t want a traditional booking engine for the smaller number of properties he has, but we could absolutely have built the same interface as the big booking sites, only on his own site.
Joe’s clients also book year after year, so they need a property-level booking contact form where they can select the property they want. And because we’re not using a booking engine labeling system (e.g. property 123456), we gave the houses names based on their location and design. When you are flipping through several sites and 10 tabs on your browser looking at various homes at the same time, this helps to remember which one you liked. Booking a vacation home from your couch might take you several sessions across days or even weeks, and this easy-to-remember naming helps when you’re talking with your family “What about that Octagon house on Brian St. in Marathon?)
Joe also wanted all of the information of the property to be above the fold – we deployed a tabbed interface. Each tab allows the user to see photos, find out property details like location, amenities and weekly booking rates
Key Lime Vacation Rentals Website
Customer journey development:
- Understand how the customer searches, lands, informs and decides and how our site design helps that process.
Website design & development:
Platform: WordPress
- Conversion tools: form collection on web site (to client) and also to CRM
- Key features: home page slider, mobile-first interface, booking form on every page and tabbed page interface to keep content above the fold
- Smart Slider 3
- Kadence Blocks
- WP Forms Pro for a simple booking form (with optional deposit payment features)
- An About Joe Curley page to capture searches for people who are looking by his name.
- Addresses on the property pages (unlike the booking sites) for people who are searching on addresses
- Website security including form captcha, login security and 2FA admin security
Options available for this type of vacation home or rental home site and client:
- Professional-class booking engines (multiple types to choose from)
- Deposit option + link right from the booking form
- Control all of your bookings from your own site (while keeping your OTA/vacation rental sites separate)
