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Waterway Houseboats

Waterway Houseboat Vacations has been bringing people together on spectacular Shuswap Lake since 1968. But this company doesn’t just rent houseboats to vacationing groups and families. It designs, builds, and customizes those houseboats in its Sicamous, B.C., boatyard. Waterway Houseboat constructs houseboats for its own fleet and for investors, private owners, and fleet operators across North America.

What Waterway Houseboat Vacations wanted from its Web provider

The single most important tool that Waterway Houseboat was looking for when it approached K1 was the ability to quickly and easily manage the content on its Web site. On the company’s previous site, updating content was an expensive process that involved the design firm that designed and managed the Web site. 

K1 outfitted the www.waterwayhouseboats.com Web site with an admin panel that stores the site’s content in a database that Waterways Houseboat staff can easily access. This gives the client complete control over the live content on its site. With the admin panel in place, Waterway Houseboat Vacations has the ability to update prices, boat features, and critical dates on the site without having to involve a Web design firm or to incur ongoing content and creative fees.

Fresh homepage features

As part of its marketing strategy, Waterway Houseboat Vacations identified several things that would be both entertaining and useful for visitors to Shuswap Lake. These include a photo of the day that staff can manage through the admin panel and a daily weather widget. All the staff needs to do is upload photos from a digital camera; the weather feed is provided by a Web service.

Structural review

After K1 was approached by Waterway Houseboat Vacations to take over the development of the company’s Web site, K1 did a comprehensive structural review of the client’s existing site. The original Web site proved to be a compilation of three separate sites that visitors found difficult to navigate. K1’s new site design and site data structure resolved the navigation difficulties identified in the review and heightened convenience for the client and the client’s clients alike.

Communication tools and member management

Among the admin tools K1 Technologies provided to Waterway Houseboat Vacations is the ability to store and manage Waterway Houseboat clients’ e-mail addresses and profiles and to send those clients targeted e-communications based on their profiles. Clients, for example, who are interested in specials receive an e-mail alerting them when new opportunities arise. Clients also can receive a bimonthly newsletter.