1. Galleries within the Navigation. 

We added functionality so you can scroll through the best eight photographs per property on the homepage and on search pages. This technology was originally designed to assist ourselves, making it possible to refresh our minds of fifty properties within a handful of minutes. To date we have not seen any other website in travel or any other industry who show galleries within navigation. At the beginning of the year whilst explaining the innovations of the website to Google’s On Line Strategist Andrew Brownlie, Andrew loved this innovation and marvelled that he two had never seen it used, and yet it was a very obvious thing to do. In all likelihood, Cape Town Luxury Villas.com is the first website in the world to integrate galleries within the navigation.

2. Enhanced and fun Favourites

Enhanced Favourites was another tool made for villa professionals them made available for our clients. When we wish to organise properties to respond to clients requests, we use our enhanced favourites system. 

You can add villas or take them away within the “+Fav’s” buttons with the love heart. At the top right of the screen, you can see how many favourites you have and click to go to your favourites page

Once inside we made if simple and fun, this page was based on our “organise photos page” in which we can simply drag and drop photos within a grid to change the order. For the favourites page we added some extra information but kept the functionality, so you look at a villa, then move it higher or lower in position.

To increase the usefulness and fun, we created a additional level, Pink Hear Favourites, where if you click the heart icon, within the favourites page the pink hear villa will be shown before any others.

3. Attributes Points 

To assist our own assessments of properties we developed “Attribute Scoring,” created by the attributes you see written within each properties display. There are about 150 different attributes a property may have, from distance to the beach to the effects of the wind. 

As an example, please consider the swimming pool, which has five different possible attributes:

• Shared Pool (10 points),
• Dip Pool (25 points),
• Private pool (50 points),
• Bigger Pool (100 points) and
• Spectacular Pool (200 points).

In the main menu navigation one can choose to “sort” (change the order) or results, by points High to Low, doing so gives a new unique way of searching for villas, by each villas attributes.

4. Bespoke Villa Lists

The order that a villa is seen within searches or on the homepage is primarily via Bespoke lists. For each of our 25 types of menus, from Camps Bay Villas to Villas with Views, each is a genuine list chosen by us at Cape Town Luxury Villas.

These lists change regularly, as new villas are added they initially get auto placed relevant to there Attribute Points, however our systems make it very easy to quickly up the placement. At the same time as we see our favourite villas drop down as new villas come it, we re-position our favourites at near the top again.

All together this makes for a very fluid vetting of villas process, with a lot of thought and passion put into the properties on the first few pages of any search.

5. Search linked to Google Analytics

In addition to the bespoke menus, that see our team, continually remaking the top villa lists, we use Google Analytics to indentify how popular pages are with clients and then boost the popular pages accordingly. Making the landscape of villas that one sees in any list a very fluid experience.