Pubs, restaurants, caterers, holiday homes, a vineyard, a coastal walking tour and the people who turn up with the photo booth. Businesses where someone is deciding where to spend an evening, a weekend or a wedding budget — usually on their phone, usually fairly quickly.
Below are some of those sites, along with a few things we've picked up about hospitality website design in New Zealand.
Click a screenshot for a closer look, or the business name to visit the live site. Shots were taken at launch — every client can update their own site, so some will have moved on since.
Pouring drinks in the village since 1883. Pub food served all day, live music most Sundays, and a sun-filled courtyard — a country pub twenty-five minutes from the city.
Chef Jeroen's European-leaning menus for weddings, corporate events and private dining. Four formats — canapés, shared plates, set menus and walk-and-fork — each rewritten seasonally rather than left to go stale.
A restored historic building on Broadway with a retractable-roof courtyard for summer and an open fire for winter. AngusPure beef, a long wine list, and reservations booked through the site.
Twenty years of short-term holiday homes across Matapouri, Ngunguru, Te Kao and Tutukaka. The search filters by dates, guests and bedrooms, which is what people actually want from an accommodation site.
A three-day private walk across a coastal farm at the tip of the Coromandel, fully catered, capped at fourteen people a day and open September to April. E-bike add-on for the last leg.
Open since 1997, a short walk from Orewa beach. Food, tap beer, live entertainment and sport on Sky, with outdoor seating and a loyalty programme you ask about at the bar.
Giant foam letters, warm LED letters, soft play sets for the under-fives and Chiavari chairs, delivered and set up across Auckland. Booked and paid for online, with Afterpay on every order.
Gill and Mick's self-contained place in Duntroon, a base for the Waitaki Valley — the braided river, the geological sites and some of the darkest night sky in the country.
Booth hire for weddings, school balls, birthdays and corporate functions around Auckland. Green screen, a choice of backdrops, social sharing, and prints that come out of the booth on the night.
Twenty acres of Matakana vines with "The Nest" sitting among them — a new-build guest house with a deck over the vineyard. Mike and Marthina host, and there's a 360° tour on the site.
Mobile soft-serve vans that started life as Mr Whippy in 2002 and still turn up to birthdays, work functions, barbecues and beach parties across Auckland. No hire fee on birthday bookings.
Auckland's first photo booth company, going since 2009 and past four thousand events. Five booth types including a glam booth, a mirror booth and the only children's booth in the country.
That's a dozen of them. There are a lot more sites in the full portfolio — hospitality alongside trades, clinics, online shops, advisers and everything else we've built over the years.
See the full portfolio →Most of these visits last under a minute. Someone wants to know if you're open, what you serve, what it costs and whether they can get a table. Everything else on the page is secondary to answering those four things fast.
Nothing loses a booking faster than turning up to a closed door, or arriving expecting a dish that came off the menu last winter. Hours belong on every page, not just Contact, and the menu needs to be text on the page rather than a PDF or a photo of a chalkboard — Google can't read those, and neither can someone on a phone in the dark.
Some of these take reservations online, some want a phone call, some don't take bookings at all for the bar but do for functions. All fine — just say which. The worst outcome is a "Book now" button that opens a contact form and then goes quiet over a weekend when the person had a date in mind.
People are choosing a room, a table or a marquee from a picture. Stock photography of somebody else's plate of food actively works against you, because it reads as generic and nobody can tell what they'd actually be walking into. Even phone photos of your own place beat a bought image.
School ball season, Christmas functions, summer weddings, the walking season closing in April. These businesses have a calendar, and the homepage should follow it rather than sitting still all year. That's the main reason we build so people can change it themselves rather than waiting on us.
Including GST, your first year of New Zealand hosting and your domain name. If you've already got a site and it just needs bringing up to date, rebuilds start at $799. Everything's set out on the pricing page, including what you'd pay each year after that.
See the pricing →