Steal this Marketing Idea and Think Like Think Sicily

Struggling for a way to present your product or service online in a creative way?  Don’t think it is possible?  Think again – and start thinking like The Thinking Traveller’s Think Sicily brand.

Think Sicily is an information portal behind the brand offering luxury and exclusive villas.    It’s a well-branded and easy to navigate site to learn more about both the company’s product as well as information about Sicily.  It’s well worth having a look because they’re doing a lot of things right.

Why Their Site is Better Than the Rest

• You can choose a product based on theme.  I LOVE this and why doesn’t every hotel do this (if you have enough rooms to do so, of course).   You can choose from family villas, romantic/honeymoon villas, or waterfront villas.  Once you find something you like, you can even add it to your ‘shortlist’ and come back after doing more searches to make a final choice.  Remarkable for a small brand like this!
• With more content, the more internal search optimisation you’ll gain.  For those of you who downloaded a copy of Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimization, you’ll have already picked up on this trick.  But Think Sicily is clued in to the tricks of the trade when  you have a larger base of website content and they’ve taken advantage of that, making sure that pages that are related are linked to each other.
• Endless Destination Information.  If I found this site and I was going to, say, Puglia: I’d look no further.  I can book my villa, look up transport information, print out things to do, read up on foods to try, learn about the history of the region… it is the proverbial kitchen sink!

What Could Be Better?

• Stronger Navigation.  While lots of information is great, I don’t like the fact that their primary navigation (on the left hand side) is separate from the breadcrumbs bar.  Visually you don’t connect the two.  There’s more than one way to do this, but if it were me I’d put the menu up at the top, underneath their blue branding bar.
• Standardise the right sidebar. There is some good use of this sidebar for testimonials and other useful information, but in some cases the sidebar is empty.  A shame – get your visitors use to it being there by filling it up with useful info.  (It doesn’t have to be the same on every page – but if it is almost always there, you provide a less jarring browser experience.)

To Learn More

How’s your website doing?  Get the feedback you need to improve conversions and turn browsers in to happy customers with our fixed-price Website Audit.  Or how about our DIY guide for brainstorming ways to better promote your product or service.