Villa Oasis, Lanzarote is a luxury self-catering villa in Nazaret, Lanzarote.
To keep costs down, the site was intended to be technically simple. However, there are lots of villas on Lanzarote, so unless we did something to make the page stand out it would never be found in the search engines and we would miss out on the web's equivalent of passing trade.
The most cost effective way forward was to create something that was rich in resources. That way, we stand a half decent chance of people finding us. They may also link to us, which would help us get an even better search engine position.
More than that, of course, we wanted the resources to be useful for our customers. The villa, as you can see, is a luxury, designer place so we wanted to gather resources suited to that market. There's no information on resources for children, for instance.
Also, by using a .co.uk domain name we wanted to say that the owners are British, so removing any anxiety over language.
I presented the images in a style intended to evoke postcards and holiday Polaroid snaps with handwritten notes. The blue is of course sampled from the pool. That's all intended to engage the visitor emotionally with the site and to help them imagine the holiday they could have.
I've worked on and off on this project for over a year, but it actually only took 27 hours to complete, which would cost about £1,000 at todays rates and could be completed, in theory, within a week. The main delay was that the owners had the Moroccan bedroom extension built so we had to wait for that before the place was ready to rent.
Much of the time was spent researching links (for instance, to save everyone doing it themselves I sat through the whole of the Teletext listing to get the list of flight suppliers) and liasing with the client about new experiences and resources we could add.
My partner and I went to Lanzarote last year, partly inspired by this. I've seen the villa and can vouch for it, and I've visited many of the places we mention and was occasionally able to include my own thoughts into the text. The client said it "Thank-you very much, all looks good".