A corporate website, turnkey, from 5 pages

Two London agencies quoted double and both wanted a January start. These ones started in November. I did not manage to defend the parallax on the case page — they talked me out of it, and rightly, because on a phone it would have been a mess. In fact the site never went down once during the raise and nothing surprising happened at the finish, although we fought with the analytics for one evening. Mail sent at 23:40 gets an answer within the hour, I checked three times.

Aggregators took 15% commission even on the nights we had brought in ourselves from Instagram, and that annoyed us more than anything else. With our own booking the main fear was that it would break in the middle of the season. It has not, although for the first month I checked every request by hand. Guests say they find us on Google. We re-shot the photos twice, and that one was on us: the first set came out dark, and January has very little daylight. I change the holiday prices myself now, they taught me.

I am happy with the work, but I take a star off. The section about us was reworked many times; some of those edits were mine, some were not, everything just moved slowly. The price never changed, and I count that to their credit. The site is fast and enquiries came, although I still take them by email rather than in a proper system — we had not agreed on that, but it is bearable for now.

My old page would not let me show a portfolio properly, and that was my only complaint. Now people arrive ready to agree, having just opened the link. I spent a month and a half gathering photos and dragged the deadline along with me — there were no fines and no nerves from their side, and for that I am grateful. How any of it is written I do not know and do not look; the admin panel makes sense at a glance.

I came in with the site needing to look expensive, and with a conversation in which I could not phrase half of it myself. They understood. There is animation, and it still loads fast — I did not believe that happens with motion. I did not like the first version of the home page, and they rebuilt it although I gave them no argument at all: I could not say what I wanted.

Three stars, and my complaint is not about the site but about the handover. The work is quality and the team knows their stuff, but halfway through the project the manager changed and I re-explained things I had already said twice. The site turned out lovely and every question was closed. I think they have tightened that process since, because a friend of mine in March had nothing like that to say about the handover.

Six locations, six booking pages, one system. I was migrating off WordPress and the blog rankings in Google scared me most — they did the redirects and traffic did not dip, although our analyst would say it better than I can. There was other stuff too: two pages did not get approved at the first pass, and for a week I started quoting a different studio to compare. They did not take offence, they costed it again and showed where they are cheaper.