News

With new owners comes change and when Walter and Jeanette took over Hooked Cabarete late last year, a new website for Hooked Cabarete was on the cards. After working on several immediate improvements to the facilities and rooms at Hooked, they had the time to focus on a new website to promote the new Hooked. A part of the new promotion was a stand alone German version of the website at HookedCabarete.de. Their new site is responsive meaning that it works on any device of any screen size, a recent trend for 2013. It’s Flash free, highly visual and utilises…

Etoile Du Monde is a very well known fashion brand in Europe. Now it is destined to become well known in the USA too. Putting her extensive fashion background to work, Julie has acquired the exclusive rights to Etoile Du Monde for the USA and will endeavour to build the brand in the USA initially with an online store and then into retail stores in the future. From her new website at EtoileDuMonde.us: Life is about deep French kisses, great adventures, midnight swims, rambling conversations, feeling good, daring and dress heavenly. I told myself that if a fashion line looks…

Launched just a few weeks ago, Cabarete Beach Condos offers 2 rental apartments in the Orillas del Mar development. Located east, or upwind of Cabarete, Cabarete Beach Condos’ Orillas del Mar apartments are both ocean front and share a great view of the pool. Check them out for your next Cabarete vacation!

We are currently profiling one of our e-commerce projects. Green Water Sports is an online store for water sports equipment. At launch the product focus will be on stand up paddle boards, paddles and accessories. The website is taking shape and will launch soon. Credit card payments will be via one of the best, if not the best, gateway setups offered by Stripe. Green Water Sports will also accept payments PayPal, but Stripe streamlines credit card processing and bypasses the need for a very costly, confusing and expensive merchant account. The only catch with Stripe, is you need a USA…

As WordPress becomes ever more popular it becomes a target for hackers and malware. Just like Windows dominates the computer market and suffers from viruses due to it’s massive market share, WordPress is suffering a similar fate. To avoid problems, keeping your installation up to date is the single most important thing you can do. Update your plugins, secure WordPress folders, automate backups in the event of disaster so you have your info and data, and limit your potential spam avenues. Not sure which plugins to use or how to backup your website? Call me now on +1 (829) 726-6219!

It has been decided, the next major project for Cabarete Web Design will be an online store that sells water sports equipment, and in particular, stand up paddle boarding gear. Under the tentative name of Green Water Sports (EDIT: Now confirmed), the store will use a WordPress base and Woocommerce as the shopping cart platform. Stay tuned as we track the development of this project.

A new surf school/surf tour/surf package option on the North Coast of the Dominican Republic is now available and open for guests. From the House of Waves website: Dominican Republic Surf School and High Performance Training House of Waves is a surf school located on the wave rich Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic. We offer guided surf trips and vacations, surf lessons and high-performance training that will take your surfing to the next level. Our coaching programs are designed for all ability levels, from the novice to the elite surfer. We invite you to enjoy great waves and a beautiful tropical paradise…

Have you ever come across an article or page on the interwebs that sounds forced or a little off? It was probably written by a robot. These robots take human written text, slice it and dice it and publish it in all sorts of locations for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes. These articles include links to various pages that may seem vaguely related. These back links build a site’s profile and eventually their ranking in Google. And we all know that a higher rank in Google is worth it’s weight in gold. However, Google is now cracking down on this style…

In expanding their concierge services, DRREBA.com is now offering vacation or long term rentals in the Cabarete and Sosua areas. The listings are controlled by WordPress, as usual, and offer easy to input data fields for each property. The galleries are native with a jquery colorbox addition. Listings are organised by category and are also fully searchable by all features and content.

When I set up a new client’s website, the first thing I do after registering the domain name is to create a Google Analytics account. This service allows you to track your site visitor numbers, time spent on site, visitor IP location, where they came from … the list goes on and on. There are so many metrics it can make the mind boggle, however, knowing where people come from, what language they speak, what screen size they use, is all extremely important information for creating a better experience for the visitor and improving and refining your content and advertising…