Name of your website?Boardwalk Realty Inc.
Your name?
Earlyn Shuffler
Your Location (city, etc)
Christ Church
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Boardwalk Realty Inc. is a family owned business, which povides Barbados real estate opportunities luxury vacation rentals to diserning international clients. The Barbados real estate market in vibrant and provides a secure property investment which appreciates every year. Boardwalk Realty also provides property mangement services in Barbados to suit your needs.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
Boardwalk Realty is a family owned and operated business, which is managed by Mrs Trudy Gibbs. She has over a decade worth of experience in the industry and can offer clients a personalised service in Property Sales, Long Term Rentals, Luxury Holiday Rentals and Property Management. Judy loves the real estate industry and enjoys showing properties to potential clients. She wanted to grow her business and thought that having her own website would be a necessary part of her strategy for reaching international clients who are searching for real estate.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
This is her first website and it was launched in 2006.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
It was decided that the key word "Barbados" was important to have in the URL we choose www.bribarbados.com
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
The site has very clean and professional look with easy navigation. It makes finding a property very easy compared to soem of the many complicated sites online.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
The goal is to build traffic to the site and grow the business.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
The development cost was reasonable but now there is a need to balance cost of marketing against results. Ongoing SEO work is being done to increase traffic and improve convertion rates. The returns from one real estate sale pays for the cost and then the investment is justified.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
If there was an unlimited budget, the site would have daily updates of video clips of every property being offered. There would also be audio clips describing the key features of each property. Updated site maps would also be used to show the location of each property.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes, we would add admin staff to respond to client request.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
The cost of Pay Per Click was more expensive than expected because of the competitiveness of the real estate and vacation travel business.
What has been your biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge is to get page one listings on the main search engines.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Pay Per Click campaigns have brought good targetted traffic to the site. Getting media coverage with industry publications was very helpful.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Website Traffic has been inconsistant and its difficult to find time to do the extra things needed to bring more traffic to the site; article writing, link exchanges etc.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
The site is in its secind year and it will be maintained for at least five years.
What is your website address?
Boardwalk Realty Inc.
