Case Study:
Stone Pitt Holiday Park Website
Based in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, Stone Pitt Holiday Park caters to caravan and self-catering holiday cottages with their 2 on-site cottages and have 36 caravan and touring pitches. Claire Morris, who owns Stone Pitt was struggling with her current website and had been stung more than once with so-called web designers building her website. Her current website at the time was doing nothing for her business and was struggling to attract any online bookings at all.
She had also attempted to hire a photographer to come and take some nice photos of the park for her website and general business promotion, but the images that came back were poor and not the quality that Claire was expecting.
She didn’t know what to do next as everything she was trying wasn’t working and people were letting her down!
As a last effort to get her business moving online, Claire got in touch with our partners over at Pembrokeshire photography and Skycam Wales to see if they could help her with photography.
Bev at SkyCam Wales advised Claire to get in touch with us at Pixel Yeti Media and the rest, as they say, was history. We met with Claire and talked through what she was looking for with her website.
Our Challenge.
Claire needed to make her business stand out withPembrokeshire being a very competitive area for holidaying throughout the year.
The holiday park is in a great location and is within 5 miles of pretty much everything you would want for an amazing family holiday. Less than a mile down the road is Folly Farm Zoo where, if you stayed on the park you could hear the lions raw of a morning! Where else are you going to get this from a holiday in Wales?…..
But Claire’s current website was not doing her fantastic holiday park any justice, it was outdated, static and plain with poor images and was not responsive to people viewing on mobile browsers. This website needed scrunching up, throwing in the bin and starting again from scratch!
There was plenty of amazing selling points to her park, it was immaculately clean with beautiful flower baskets and wooden carvings from fallen trees, and it was bang in the middle of all the places tourists like to visit when they stay in Pembrokeshire. But you didn’t find any of this information on her current tired and outdated website.
Claire was also paying a company nearly £600 a year for a booking system for her website that was letting her down. Not only did she not know how many visitors she was getting to her website, but visitors were also met with frustration when they could not view any availability on the park. Website visitors had to enter dates in hope that it would return with a booking option. It was like playing on the slot machines and hoping it would land on a jackpot!
We had to get down to business and help Claire and her business out.
Our Solution.
We build all our websites for a purpose, to make our clients money! Nobody wants a website just to take up space on the internet, which was exactly what Claire’s site at the time was doing.
Our checklist went as follows;
- It must be responsive and re-shape to mobile device screens as 60% of all website traffic is through mobile browsers.
- It must show off the park and all it’s selling points
- The pages must flow and navigate the user into finding out information quickly
- Must be easy to find out availability and book online
We built the website like all our website on the WordPress platform so it was responsive to mobile browsers and easy for Claire to keep updating with news and blog posts to promote the park and tap into the local area. This was also linked to her Facebook page where all the content she creates on her new website will automatically post to her Facebook page to help drive past visitors that previously liked the parks page, back to the new website and encourage repeat bookings.
We also had to give visitors a better experience when trying to view park availability and book their stay. The user experience is of big importance to us when designing any website, but the current booking system that Claire was paying was far from easy or intuitive to use.
We replaced this with a booking system that was responsive and easy to understand, making the booking process easy for visitors. We also set up Stripe payment gateways which is the cheapest and easiest way of taking card payments online.
We also made sure that Claire would know exactly how many visitors came to her website and made sure all data was tracked by setting up google analytics. Now she would know how many visitors came to her website, where they have come from on the internet and what they are doing page by page on the website.
It makes finding any issues with your website a lot easier in the future if you know what people are doing and if you have some facts and figures to go by.
The Results.
Since launching Stone Pitt’s new website over a year ago, Claire has seen a dramatic improvement in visitors to her website and online bookings.
Through setting up Googles page analytics we were able to monitor how many visitors the new Stone Pitt website was getting and how many were converting into paying customers. We also received positive feedback from guests using the website.
Since launching the website with the new booking system in full flow, Stone Pitt has had an 84% increase in online bookings. Going form 70* bookings in the previous year with the old system, to 170 in the first 12 months with the new website going live. With all 170 bookings boing brand new visitors that haven’t stayed at the park before.
- 170 NEW online bookings in 12 months (Booking system works!)
- Average of
- 53% of website visitors come from google searches (good SEO!)
- A low bounce rate of 33% for website visitor (easy to navigate and find what they are looking for)
- Over 70% of visitors are through mobile browsers (Good job the website is responsive!)
* The original number of 70 bookings through the past system could be less as Claire was also using the system to book stays over the phone, resulting in the % increase possibly being greater if this is the case.
Past visitors still like to phone their reservations through and Claire adds these separately and is not included to the total bookings taken through the websites booking system.
Our Review
There is still a lot more we can do for Stone Pitt Holiday Park to gain new park visitors and promote the park, and the website has been going from strength to strength since its launch. But from where Stone Pitt stands now is a mile away from where it was when we first met Claire and discussed the issues she had been having at the time.
Now that Claire’s faith has been restored that not all web designers are useless and we won’t run off with her money, Stone Pitt has signed up to one of our care plans that ensures the website users are safe and secure with monthly site updates and security monitoring, with offsite cloud backups and up to 1 hour of development time included a month.
Claire never has to worry about her site having any issues going forward as we are always monitoring and caring for her website, and are here with phone support at any time should she need us.
Services Used
- Web Design
- Website Copywriting
- Logo & Branding
- Website Care Plan
- Photography through our partners at SkyCam Wales
- Graphic Design (for new sign)
