Round two: after Kate's first look
Kate liked the management site's look, wasn't keen on the town boxes or the font, found the video grainy, and pointed us at Fresh Air Holidays and Stay Cotswold. Here's what those two sites do well, and two new homepage concepts built on it.
Fresh Air Holidays
Clean cards with a photo carousel, feature tags (hot tub, sea view, pets), guests, bedrooms and a "from" price on every card. A locations grid with live property counts. Property pages use drop-downs for the space, neighbourhood and getting around. It runs on WordPress and Elementor, like ours, so this is a refurb, not a rebuild.
Stay Cotswold
Deep drop-down menus: places by county, features, size, occasions, events. A "search 311 cottages" button, a last-minute band, inspiration tiles, an illustrated map of where the homes are, and a local guide under every property. It feels like a local expert, not just a booking site.
Concept A: Coast and Country Concept B: Local Knowledge
Concept A
The management site's fonts, colours and rounded cards, laid out like Fresh Air: search over the film, browse by place, filterable homes with photo carousels, kinds of stay, why book direct, the team, guides and questions.
Concept B
Laid out like Stay Cotswold, with a new font pairing: drop-down menus with counts for every place, feature and size, a "free this weekend" band, inspiration tiles, a map with a pin per town, and county tabs.
Every number updates itself from Guesty
Nothing on either concept is typed in. How many homes, which towns, how many take dogs or sleep eight, the "from" prices and what's free this weekend are all calculated from Guesty. Press Show live numbers on either concept to see them highlighted. On the real site the same numbers come from the listings Guesty sends to the website every night, so a new home appears in the menus, counts and map on its own. One rule to agree: the Durley "both barns" listing is the two barns let together, so the concepts say 35 homes, not 36.
The video
The homepage film is grainy because the version on the site is 1280×720 and heavily compressed (2.4 MB), stretched across a much wider screen. The 4K master is fine. Re-exported from the master, it's sharp at about 13 MB: a 1440p AV1 version for modern browsers and a 1080p H.264 one for the rest. It only loads on desktop, after the page has appeared, so it doesn't slow the site down. This is now live on the current site too (21 September).
Same frame, same zoom. Left: the current video. Middle: new 1080p. Right: new 1440p.
YouTube isn't the answer for a background film. It shows YouTube's logo and title as it starts, loads more code than the video saves, won't play until a guest accepts cookies, and still picks its own quality. It's fine for a "watch the film" button with sound.
Things to do, like Stay Cotswold's inspiration
Both concepts now have a "Things to do near our homes" section: 26 places across five areas, each showing how many of our homes are within a few miles. That number is worked out from Guesty, so it stays right as homes come and go. Thirteen of them already link to guides we've written. How we'd build it out:
- "Stay near" pages for the big draws. One page each for Southampton's cruise terminals, Goodwood, Victorious Festival, the Air Tattoo, Cheltenham Festival, the Boat Show, Winchester Christmas Market, Marwell Zoo and the Historic Dockyard. Each lists the nearest homes (live from Guesty), how far they are, when it's on, and answers to the usual questions. These are the pages people, and AI tools, find when they search "where to stay for Goodwood".
- A guides hub. Our 30 blog posts sorted by area and type (days out, food, walks, events, rainy days), each with "homes near here".
- Seasonal pages. Christmas and New Year, summer holidays, winter hot-tub breaks, each showing which homes are still free on those dates, straight from Guesty.
- Later. Offers from local partners (our "community" value) and extras during a stay, like hampers or early check-in.
Our values, owner log in and "List your home"
Both concepts now show the six values from Lee and Harvey's 2025 proposal, with the wording tightened for the website, plus a shorter mission line. "Owner log in" goes straight to our Guesty owners portal (owners.bluepuffinstays.com), and "List your home" goes to the management site.
The font
The live site uses five fonts: Times New Roman for headings, Nanum Gothic for subheadings, Roboto for the menu, Karla for text, and a custom font that no longer loads. That mix is most of why it looks dated. Concept A uses the management site's pair (Fraunces and Quicksand). Concept B tries Newsreader and Mulish. Kate picks one pair and we use only that.
Already live, no design decision needed
Sitemap
Was broken, so search engines could not get a list of the pages. Fixed, and it now repairs itself if the nightly Guesty update breaks it again.
robots.txt
Was empty. Now welcomes Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini by name and points them at the sitemap.
Summary page for AI tools
A plain page at /llms.txt listing who we are, the awards, and every property by town. It rebuilds itself from the live properties.
Search descriptions
Written for 33 blog posts and the Contact, Cookie and Privacy pages. These are the grey lines under a Google result.
Homepage title
Now "Serviced Accommodation Portsmouth | Blue Puffin Stays". The homepage already ranks about 7th on Google for that search.
Town names
Pages said Norcote, Widley, Fratton or "Southampton, Southampton". They now say Cirencester, Portsmouth and Winchester.
Awards
The 2025 and 2026 LUXlife wins added, four broken award badges replaced.
Privacy policy
The WordPress sample text replaced with a real one.
Proposed, and why
All of these change what a guest sees, so they are Kate's call. In order of what we think matters most.
| Change | Why it matters | See it |
|---|---|---|
| Questions and answers on every page | The single biggest one. AI tools quote the sentence straight after a question. We answer in the first line, no preamble. | example |
| A distances list on property pages | Named places with miles and minutes. Guests ask this constantly, and it is the kind of fact an AI answer repeats. | example |
| Clean property introductions | The pages currently show the Airbnb text, symbols and discount pitches included. A short honest intro instead. | example |
| "Who this suits" on each property | Three lines saying who the home is right for, and who it is not. | example |
| Links between related pages | Property pages average one link in the body. Nothing points to the other homes in the same town. | example |
| An area page per town | A page that answers "where should I stay in Portsmouth" and lists every home there. | example |
| Guides that list properties | The format AI answers quote most often. Ours first, a competitor or two below for credibility. | example |
Where we are today
From the first monthly AI check on 15 September, across 87 answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini:
- Named in 6 of 87 answers. Mostly for small places like Titchfield and Durley.
- Nothing for Portsmouth or Southampton guests, where most of the properties are.
- Found mainly through Airbnb and Booking.com listings, not through our own site.
- Microsoft Copilot cited the site 318 times in 3 months, but over half of those were people already searching "blue puffin stays".
The pattern is clear. People who know the name find us. People describing what they want do not.