www.smart-tactics.com

Ahernes

Ahernes is a famous restaurant and luxury guesthouse in Youghal, county Cork. This is now the 3rd revision of the Ahernes website and reflects changing web usage patterns and needs.

The original website was not created by Smart Tactics. It was in place for a number a years but had failed to inspire much in the way of online bookings for the accommodation - its main priority. We replaced this website in 2003 with a new site that was coupled with web based marketing that we have created and proactively manage. These had an almost immediate impact. We agreed a no-win no-fee agreement and we set an aggressive target (a 20 fold increase in online sales). We hit it.

We renewed our agreement in 2005 and in summer 2006 replaced the 2nd website with the latest site. The reasons for the change were twofold. Firstly, web tastes are ever changing and so a refresh was needed, but we also needed new functionality including the ability for Ahernes staff to make edits (latest offers, menu's etc) and the ability to run newsletter lists from the website - in compliance with EU anti spam legislation. We needed to be able to capture users email and their permission. An easy way to create email newsletters and send them. Plus an automatic system to allow users to 'unsubscribe' if they wish to. All of this is implemented and we have an active mailing list of 700 already.

One of the other goals was to maintain or improve the Google rankings for the Ahernes site. The 2nd site was highly optimised for Google in HTML. We were moving to a CMS (content management system - which allows multiple editors) and it is difficult to match optimised HTML within a CMS site. But we did it. In fact we did rather better than that. A simple search of 'famous restaurant' in Google will scan 30 million restaurant websites and decide that the world's most famous restaurant is Ahernes!
  

  • Content management system for easy owner amends
  • Very high Google rankings and popularity
  • Integrated online booking
  • Integrated newsletter creation and list management
  • Integrated photo gallery
  • Integrated video

Website: http://www.ahernes.net/