Creating Tenerife.co.uk

Yesterday was a big deal for us, we had a baby!

As you may have seen, our latest site tenerife.co.uk was launched publicly with a very nice article on tnooz.

Almost a year after acquiring the domain and about 8 months since we started working on it, it’s always a great feeling when a site goes “out there”.

As explained in the tnooz article, the aim of the site is to provide more in the way of information for our visitors than the price-orientated sunshine.co.uk site, while leveraging the domain to rank well in the search engines.

Acquiring the domain

Early 2009 I was having a chat with Frank Paul about buying some holiday related domains to re-invest some of our profits from the previous year. As a man with all the right contacts, he very quickly arranged a deal with the then owner of tenerife.co.uk and majorca.co.uk, two of our biggest destinations.

How much you ask? Each was a substantial five figure sum is all I have to say on the matter!

Holding page and logo

As there was no content on the domain, we quickly had Caboodle Design knock us up a logo (similar to the sunshine format) and added a holding page. Not the prettiest, but it did the job.

Expert

Last July I started the hunt for an “expert” on Tenerife. Here’s how you advertise for such positions in the current social media age -

and here’s how you apply for said position -

After a bit of internet research, I jumped onto Amazon and ordered Andrea’s [Andy's] book, but was already convinced she would fit the bill and more from reading her blogs.

Within a few weeks we had a plan of action and I even met up with Andy for a chat while on holiday in Tenerife in the October.

Logo Concepts

Michelle at Caboodle Design was tasked with creating logo concepts for tenerife.co.uk, and as usual she produced some great logos. We’d already been down this path with majorca.co.uk but we wanted something that was specific to Tenerife.

Extending the brand

After a few weeks trying to decide which logo / colour scheme to go for, we had a brainwave. KISS! We decided to have all the Geo sites match the main sunshine brand, much easier in terms of design and development (we’d just acquired tunisia.co.uk that week), and importantly getting the brand in front of our visitors whichever site they visit.

Having spent a few weeks going back and forward with Michelle over the Tenerife concepts, she was very understanding when we told her we weren’t going to use any of them, she promptly made us the logo above!

Design & Development

The search and booking process is entirely taken from sunshine, so all the site needed was the front-end content pages designed and developed. Or so we thought.

Working with our local expert Andy, we quickly realised (well, she pointed it out) that most sites don’t accurately reflect the location and breakdown of resorts and hotels in Tenerife, generally lumping everything into “catch all” resorts like Costa Adeje. Since we wanted the site to be “right”, we had to develop a whole new level within the site’s architecture compared to sunshine.co.uk . Fun.

Here’s an example – Costa Adeje has all the hotels and “mini-resorts” contained within, like El Duque and Fanabe which also have their own page with the hotels in their locale.

As you can also see from these pages, one of the USP’s of the site is the side-by-side descriptions, contrasting the typical Travel Agent blurb with Andy’s rather honest descriptions.

Content

With the front-end starting to take shape, we concentrated the efforts of our Content Team on Tenerife, making sure we had every possible accommodation from all of our suppliers, checking all the current information we had was up to date and writing descriptions for the hotels and resorts.

Jack

Our resort level pages seemed a bit bare. We wanted to add some pictures but the only images we had were of hotels. As luck would have it, Andy’s husband and co-author Jack is also a damn good photographer.

He was tasked with visiting every resort and mini-resort we had and taking some nice pics! The results look great on the site and you can really see how good they are here.

Launch

Tenerife.co.uk actually “opened” about 3 weeks ago, but we kept it quiet while we did some final testing and let the search engines have a rummage through the site.

With the article published on tnooz marking our “coming out” party, we can now concentrate on marketing the site and picking up some links and traffic (yes you cynics, that’s part of the reason for this spectacularly long blog post).

Today saw the release of a consumer and a trade PR from 10 Yetis, our Public Relations Agency, and they are currently negotiating a nice little PR spot to do with an upcoming event.

Hat Tips

Many, many people have been involved in this project in one way or another, be they paid or otherwise

• Frank Paul
• Caboodle Design
• Andrea & Jack Montgomery
• Stephen Pavlovich
• All the sunshine people involved, you know who you are!
• Kevin May @ tnooz.com for being very patient!

Cheers one and all!

That’s All

I hope you found some or any of that interesting, it’s been a strange development project as we switched from working on majorca.co.uk to tenerife.co.uk about half way through the year.

We’ve also been busy re-developing sunshine.co.uk, which made it harder work to develop the other sites in tandem due to frequent changes. This probably accounts for the length of time involved in this site build, as it often played second fiddle to it’s big brother.

Comments/ feedback / questions very welcomed!