As a Vacation or Hotel property owner, you will appreciate how competitive the rental market has become and the need for you to make your property or Hotel stand out from the crowd. The outstanding design of our sites provide you with real competitive advantage in the villa rental market by simply reaching more of your potential customers and offering them the best Property and Hotel browsing features and experience. Click on our images above to preview our new Elegance sample web sites in action.

State of the art technology and outstanding design combine to give you a competitive advantage in your market with the following key features:

Open Source Software basis:

The basis of our software is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made this particular software the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, there is many open source solutions  freely available should you find your business growing in an unexpected direction !

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Totally searchable content management system (CMS)

A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site; much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don't have to manage it and BEST of all, all the content can be searched!

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100% Database Driven

Our sites are 100% database driven using the CMS. Unlike dumb HTML pages, each and every page of your site is generated uniquely at that precise moment in time, responding to both your owner controlled requirements and the browsing customer’s requests both for information and viewing preferences. For example, this means a property owner can add bookings, change prices, load offers etc. …. or the customer can select availability or daily pricing …… and it will instantly reflect on pages generated on your site.

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XHTML

Out sites are generated in XHTML (not HTML) which is a much stricter language. Elite believe this is important since more and more browsers are becoming standards aware. Poorly written HTML code could at worst prevent certain users from viewing your site or at least will slow down site delivery and make it difficult for search engines to list your site properly. For this reason, all our sites are validated to ensure 0% errors with the industry leading professional valuators that exceed the quality standards laid by the W3C (web's governing body) standards for X-HTML. Please be aware that many sites that validate to the W3C's free on-line validation standards would not pass the industry leading professional validation, which we adhere to.

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Disability Features

In addition to regulatory compliance (eEurope Plan) and common human decency there is a hard nosed business reason to make your web site accessible for users with disabilities since its estimated that 14% of users have some form of disability (e.g. color blindness, poor sight or inability to use a mouse device) That is a large percentage of users to ignore if your site is not designed to cater for their needs. Our sites have taken account of a very large number of the hundreds of guidelines laid down by the WAI (W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative) and the following key features are available upon request:

•    Our Elite sites adhere to the ideal of simplicity and the KISS principle (Keeping It Simple Stupid) by separation of content from presentation through the strict use of cascading style sheet standards. This is essential to ensure that the content remains consistent across a wide variety of browser devices, enables the customer to dictate their own preferred viewing preferences on your site, (e.g. text size) and is an essential prerequisite for sites which wish to provide content for users with disabilities.
•    Some pages have full access key controls i.e. the site is fully operational without a mouse
•    While some of the sites have been designed to make full use of any local customer enabled browser features such as JavaScript the major features of the site have been designed to work in circumstances where these facilities have not been enabled thus making the site more accessible to a wider audience with a variety of local settings.

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Usability

On the web you only really get one chance to make any impression. When the first impression isn't good you don't get a second chance because the customer will never return. A poorly designed site can literally exclude large percentages of your potential customers who will simply turn to your competitors. Although the basis of our sites are open source software some of the propriety software  technologies embedded into our sites  have been designed from the ground up with literally hundreds of researched and proven design concepts to ensure that your site reaches more of your potential customers and keeps them on your site rather than a competitors, for example:

•    Research shows that over 50% of all users are 'search' dominant rather than 'link dominant'. In other words if you don't have a search good search facility on your site they will not browse your site. Our sites have search facilities placed prominently on each page to enable customers to instantly find the information they are looking for.
•    Research has shown that fast loading sites achieve proportionally more traffic than slow loading sites. In other words if your site's too slow your customers will leave. While our sites are designed to be fast loading, we also offer our customers a choice between local and international hosting – depending on their unique needs.
•    14% of users have some form of disability. Our sites can be optimized to cater for these users and our site’s special features will  keep these browsing customers on your site rather than your competitors
•    25% of users browse at 800x600 screen size while the majority browses at 1024x768 or greater. Many web sites are built to operate at the lower screen size thus wasting a lot of screen real estate; others build to the most common larger size thus forcing 25% of customers to scroll horizontally. Our templates are designed to expand or contract dynamically regardless of the screen size to ensure the maximum use of screen real estate without any horizontal scrolling. This feature can also be managed by the system administrator.
•    There is no point in having a fully featured web site if its offline or on a slow Internet connection. That is why your web site will be hosted with a guaranteed uptime of 99.9% and Industry-leading (18,000 MBit) Connectivity to the Internet.
•    Poor spelling, grammar or broken links will quickly annoy your customers. For this reason, each and every page of your site is checked for spelling and grammar to Microsoft standards prior to release and your site links are automatically checked daily to ensure they are functioning.
•    These and hundreds of other usability design features ensure your site can reach more people and keep them on your site.

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Conversion Driven

In the majority of e-tail websites, conversion rates are appallingly low (typically a few percent). In other words, the majority of sites are not meeting their customer’s needs. Research has also shown that a staggering 70% of customers who show up at an e-tailor with intention to buy, fail to complete the sale. This is of course, if the site has ANY immediate payment solutions available. We prefer to see these statistics as a huge opportunity whereby a very small movement in a sites ability to convert prospective buyers can significantly increase your conversion rate above an average site.

Conversions increase when visitors achieve their goals. We understand the consumer psychology that pulls your customers along the path they need to complete their goals (and importantly yours). This is not just a few tips and tricks rather it encompasses hundreds of researched techniques (practiced by the leading e-tailors) which understand the most effective, layout, font, color, sentence structure, words etc. to maintain the momentum of customer initial interest through to a sale. This is based on the established marketing fundamental that: no detail is too small, everything on your web site either detracts or adds from its ability to convert your traffic. By way of simple example, a ‘comic sans’ font used in emails has been proven in studies to lead to 30% more conversions than other type faces since consumers feel a conversational tone. Consequently our site emails are all generated in comic sans.

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Leading Edge Technology

We invest heavily in the latest, popular technologies to ensure our customers benefit from the latest advances in technology as they become available. This includes 3rd party products such as SMS and our sites have recently benefited from the use of Ajax technologies (which are only just being utilized by the likes of Google) to bring a more ‘real-time’  interactive web experience e.g. real time form field checking and on-screen quotes.