If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Welcome to 2009 and the brand new Anchorage Cottages website!

We have had a long and rewarding relationship with the Anchorage Cottages.  We’ve had the pleasure of working with several managers over the years, designing business cards, brochures, rate cards, postcards, and their original website.   That site was rockin’ back in 1998 when we built it!

In 2008, however, it was clear that the site’s time had passed.  Manager Lynette Dowty, who has an outstanding eye for design and a keen mind for business, committed to the process of starting from scratch with the outfit’s online presence.

Many of our clients come to us thinking they can throw money at us and *poof* they’ll have a website.  They’re right, but we’ll fight them tooth and nail about it.  Anyone can put up a web page with some text and a photo or three.  But it takes strong collaboration between the owners, managers, marketers and designers to build a good website that has a strong return on investment.

For small businesses, the owner, manager, marketer, designer, chief cook and bottle washer are all the same person.  Trying to find time to develop effective site content, carefully crafted text and photos, while also running the business and working in it…is daunting.  And so, despite the best of intentions, the site build took longer than any of us anticipated.  Wisely, Lynette made a commitment to quality over speed and we restructured the production schedule accordingly.

Keleigh was designer on the project, with Sabrina doing most of the build, with a little help from Karl and Kathy heading up search engine optimization.  Lynette provided the writing and photos.  We used a flash-based slideshow tool to run the cottage slideshows as well as the photo changing throughout the site.  Google’s inline maps make it easy for visitors to find the motel.  A full-service email newsletter rounds out the technical aspects of the build.

Here’s a little-known secret:  Anchorage Cottages are one of the most-booked vacation properties on the Peninsula.  In our business, we always meet information like that with a big “why?”.   The cottages have a vintage charm, while being updated, crisply clean and with all the amenities you’d expect to find at a flag motel.  Each is unique and a little funky, which is true of most “beach construction” of the era.  But the thing that really sets them apart from other properties is the FEEL of the place.  It’s akin to walking onto the set of Dirty Dancing; there’s a feeling of having arrived at the summer resorts some of us remember and most of us wish we had known.

There is a ball court, tennis, volleyball, lawn and dunes, a path to the beach.  They’re close to downtown activities, but far enough out of town that the quiet is blissful.  The staff is friendly and genuinely cares whether  you have a good time while staying with them.  They’re attentive, yet stay out of your way.  Dogs and kids are welcome; family reunions are common and the rates are downright reasonable.  It’s a place to gather.  It’s a place for a retreat of solace.  Kitchens, fireplaces, books, games–the R&R of the vacations of our childhoods.  All these things combine to make the occupancy rates of the Anchorage Cottages incredibly strong.   What that means to visitors is:  BOOK EARLY!

Check out the site.  We’re proud of it and welcome your feedback!

The recent release of WordPress 2.7 is exciting us over here at beachdog.com.  The upgrades to the popular blogging software are making it even easier to give our clients blog-based websites they can edit easily on their own.

Such is the case with Homespun Quilts.  When we first built Lydia and Thor’s site in the spring of 2007, we included a blog as a standalone application.  While it was integrated into the site, it wasn’t the backbone.  Lydia has been editing their site using Contribute, a great choice for editing html-driven websites without having to learn, well, html.

Recently, Karl and Sabrina converted the site to being completely built with WordPress.  Now Lydia can manage both her blog and her website using the same online interface.  Updates are simple and in real-time, making editing the site even easier for her–and no more costs in updating editing software.

Better still, there is some search engine advantage to having her site built using a social networking tool like WordPress, if she uses it well.  Regular posts, attention to key words and a few other tips will undoubtedly increase the presence of Homespun Quilts on Google, MSN, Yahoo! and the like.

The fun part of this upgrade is the variety of plug-ins available for WordPress 2.7.  Take Lydia’s New Year’s Survey and notice her whirling tag cloud.  These are just a couple of the new ‘toys’ she has in store for her customers.  Stay tuned!

This project was a first for our web team: build a site for a vacation rental home owned by a couple who does not own a computer and has never been in the transient lodging business before.  We love a challenge!

Because we have extensive tourism experience, we were able to walk the owners through the process of deciding on rates and policies with which to get started.  We set the site up in WordPress, which allows for easy editing by other family members and also offers some advantage in terms of online marketing.

We walked the client through a third party vacation rental-specific online reservations system, where they set up their own account.

We’re delighted to report that they’re having a great first season and have been very pleased with how the site is working for them.