After the fourth edition of SevenHolidays‘ successful book Resorts of Maldives, it was time to go online. Firstly to serve the same purpose but to a wider audience and for free: to educate holidaymakers about which resort is best for them with personal, unbiased reviews and photography. Secondly, to sell those holidays.
Resort page on sevenholidays.com
The book is a page turner. Enjoyable to read, as you marvel at the luxurious top resorts, and get sucked in to deciding which resort you would like the most. Putting all this information online (free) from a content perspective was about finding a neat way to present the reviews and photography, but more importantly, of sucking people in in the first place.
When I first visited Copyblogger I experienced this sucking in effect. I would be halfway through an article telling myself ‘this is the last one’ when a headline would catch my eye in the right hand column and I’d go for just one more.
Headlines in the right column
This is microcontent at its best. So for sevenholidays.com I put in a catchy headline for each resort, from the front page in, and appearing at the top and bottom of every review page.
Every resort also needed a summary, and each review needed editing for the web. In addition there was new content to ghostwrite and edit: a Maldives Guide and glossary, aimed to be useful to those holidaying there, rather than give boring facts about the country.
Did you know, for example, that you can always drink the resort water (regardless of what the signs say), to head for westerly islands in our winter months if you want to see whale sharks, and that one of the single most important factors if taking kids is to find an island with mature palms to provide shade?
Content work for sevenholidays.com involved writing, editing, micro-content, branding, positioning, SEO, and information architecture, as part of the Endis Solutions team designing and building the whole site. It was great to have a piece of content (the book) to begin with, but the challenges were in translating it into compelling, useful web material, and then to research and produce other content to create a dynamic context in which to house it.
I think it has worked well. And I’ve got my eye on Mirihi. What about you?
[...] joy of content strategy for smaller web sites! One minute I’m immersed in The Maldives’ most magnificent resorts, the next in a portal for plumbers in [...]