Case Studies

Rancho Sol Del Pacifico is a beautiful estate situated above Malibu overlooking the Pacific Ocean and is the hub of a multi-business enterprise. The owners of this magnificent estate wanted a fresh, up-to-date website to market their wedding and event business. After a tour of the estate it quickly became apparent that Rancho Sol Del Pacifico is the perfect location for wedding ceremonies and receptions.

The problem was not in the facilities themselves but how we were not able to find the estate’s main website on the Internet. The foremost option was to go through a wedding referral website that had a link to the Rancho Sol Del Pacifico website.

A simple search on Google to locate the estate’s services did not yield any significant search results. For example, a keyword search for “Malibu wedding locations” did not return results for Rancho Sol Del Pacifico’s own website.
The current Rancho Sol Del Pacifico website is comprised mainly of images. While the image showed off the beautiful estate the content was buried in the images and not being properly indexed by search engines.

We met with Pacifico’s owners to help them design a web-based solution for their wedding and event destination business. Valet Software was enlisted to design an up-to-date, enhanced website utilizing current search optimization techniques.

During the initial meeting we found that the estate also has a winery, a horse farm, and is a preferred movie and TV location, information otherwise not known because the website was not properly optimized for keyword searches. The Rancho Sol Del Pacifico website will be focused on weddings, but encompasses the owner’s other businesses and amenities into the main website. The project will be rolled out in a series of phases with each business launching with new design and content accessible from the main website.

 

Hilton Hotels Corp in Beverly Hills came to us seeking a solution to provide travel agents a way to see and book special leisure tariff rates for all participating Hilton Hotels. The actual portal to the travel agents was the simple part of this project. Display all participating Hilton brand hotels with the amenities and rates with search capabilities. The hard part of the project was gathering all the data and approving the data before displaying it to the agents. The yearly process starts early July, notification goes out to all 4500+ hotels in the Hilton hotel family of brands (Hilton Hotels, Doubletree Hotels, Hampton Inn, Hilton Garden Inn, Homewood Suites, Waldoff Astoria, and Embassy Suites). They are asked if they want to participate, and if so to validate the leisure rates they wish to post. This data is collected and imported into MySQL tables to be used by the travel Agent application. An internal portal for administrators at head quarters goes over each hotel and is checked for proper rate, amenities, and breakfast services. The address and legal name are checked against the Hilton Mainframe. This process normally takes about a month to complete. Notifications are sent out again to let all hotels know that the rates will be published. The next years rates need to be published for travels booking months in advanced. We have been doing Leisure Rates for Hilton for over 5 years. Over the years, we have added special feature to the system, like having Hotels post special discounts that will highlight based on a users search results.

To promote new releases of music, EMI Records needed a tool to display the art work and song listing of the music catalog. Emi puts out a "Book Release" every 2-3 weeks. They needed an admin tool to upload the PDF's, thumbnails, and Hi-res images to the site and set up and new release book.

The public website (www.eminewreleases.com) need to be "cool and hip" looking, with a user friendly interface to print hi-res images, download the catalog, and look at past release books. The site, written in Flash, gives the end user at first glance a way to select a present or past catalog. Using some of the cool features of Flash, a user can call up an image and zoom-in zoom-out (which was great for art work with wording).

To this day, EMI Records has 30+ Release Books online for all music lovers to browse through.