Case Study - The Inn at Westwynd Farm

Stefanie Galloway | 25 August 2006 |

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Making a new design work for you!

Customer Overview - The Inn at Westwynd Farm is a bed and breakfast located on a 32-acre horse farm, home to 20 horses, offering seven rooms in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania. The inn, built in 1858 and a classic Pennsylvania bank barn, is only three miles north of Hershey.

Goals - Carolyn Troxell, the property’s owner, has been with Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc. since 2003. After two years, one of our goals was to design a new website. We wanted to create a more appealing design, add new features and optimize the website for the search engines. Once the new site was complete, we continued to aggressively market the inn.

Strategy - Although The Inn at Westwynd Farm got fairly good traffic, Carolyn wanted to bring her website up to date. The website was too long and the navigation was not up to date. The design was somewhat dated with different fonts and many different graphics and photos. Carolyn agreed to our suggestions to have a make-over of her webpage.

Quick loading design including a custom graphic header
Appealing photo flash show with upgraded photos on all web pages
Self-explaining drop down navigation system in the header of the website
Adding more pages to the site to enhance search engine performance
Smaller site layout for information available at a quick glance
Specials on the site

Before

Westwynd Old Site

When the design was implemented, the promotion team started extensive keyword optimization research, and top relevant keywords were positioned throughout the website. After bookings reached 90% for the weekends, Carolyn wanted to increase weekday reservations. We decided to submit the site to business and women’s travel niche directories and to an online lodging directory [bedandbreakfast.com] with the ability to make a reservation only on weekdays. We also submitted them to link building directories to increase their link popularity and focused on directory work for a strong online presence to round up the promotion strategy.

After

Results - The new website has received great attention from internet users. The traffic to their site has increased 15% on average when comparing the traffic between January and July of last year with this year. Since the new site has gone live, the availability-redirect page has gotten 15,044 visitors and shows up third in the most requested pages after the homepage and accommodations page. The availability page has a bounce rate of only 13.53%.

Whatever the visitor is looking for, this site is up to date and offers any possible information needed about the inn and the area.

The tracker installed on their site shows that searches on Google, visithhc.com (a local directory), Yahoo, and MSN bring the most traffic to the site, followed by bbonline.com and bedandbreakfast.com.

Conclusion - The Inn at Westwynd Farm reached its goals to improve its website, to attract more internet users, and to increase the number of bookings. People like the new site; it is far more appealing and attractive. Our optimization practices gave the site more exposure and raised the number of bookings during the week and for the month. This reveals that a website, which works for you everyday, is the most important business tool you may have.

Quote - “This year has been exceptional for us,” said owner Carolyn Troxell. “Through July, we have booked more rooms than all of last year. If we didn’t book any more rooms, we’d be above 64.5% occupancy rate for the year, which is 1,414 room nights booked. Through the same time last year, we had an occupancy rate of 48.1%, 1,054 room nights booked. Our occupancy rates for June and July are 95%. So far through August, our rate is 93.5%. Looking ahead, September shows 76.7% and October 60.2% occupancy rates. People tell us that our website is welcoming and it’s drawing people in. Our weekends are almost booked solid, and after looking at our availability page people will rearrange their plans to book during the week.”

By Stefanie Galloway and Jim Buckley - Blizzard Internet Marketing