Stewarts Bay Lodge

The latest website created by Webilicious® is for Stewarts Bay Lodge standard and deluxe self-contained accommodation including Gabriel's on the Bay Restaurant and Function Centre, Port Arthur's only waterside restaurant. Stewarts Bay Lodge is ideally placed for a holiday exploring Port Arthur and the rest of the attractions on the Tasman Peninsula such as the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park and Pennicott's Tasman Island Cruises. The 22 acre (9 hectare) property is in a stunning bush location fronting on to Stewarts Bay with access to the beach and within walking distance of the Port Arthur Historic Site.

Web Design

The website is built with Joomla 3.x and a customised RocketTheme template, "Osmosis". I chose Osmosis because I wanted a full width or "fluid" template. The styling has been updated quite extensively and the Stewarts Bay Lodge website looks quite different to the Osmosis demonstration page on the RocketTheme website.

Customisations include (for example):

  • simplification of backgrounds
  • the menu font size and spacing has been optimised for each responsive screen width
  • the main content background has been made transparent to help show off a background image at the bottom of the page
  • a full width slideshow on the home page with a shorter height version on the tablet version of the website and which is not displayed at all on the mobile version of the website
  • amended font styles and colours to match client's paper based marketing material

The website works well responsively with sets of images and information boxes scaling as the screen width varies. On the mobile version of the website, images and information boxes are set to stack vertically one on top of the other at full width.

Web Development

Apart from the standard extensions such as Akeeba Backup and Akeeba Admin Tools that I install on every website, I have installed "AllVideos" plug-in, "Event Gallery", "jPanel", "Noo Google Map" and "Slideshow CK"  which are all free or have free versions.

Event Gallery

This gallery from professional photographer Sven Blüge works well responsively and excels at displaying rows of mixed portrait and landscape images very well together. Social sharing buttons have been enabled so that any image can easily be shared to various social networks.

jPanel Sliding Module

The jPanel module has been selected to display promotions on the website. I feel this is a better option for promotions compared to an intrusive pop-up or similar as the tab is displayed out of the way when the page initially loads but is still obvious to website visitors who may be interested in the latest special offer. The module displays the contents of another module or (as in this case) the contents of a particular article. It is easy for website owners to update the article and to publish or unpublish the module via Module Manager.

Up until the end of November 2014, mention when booking that you saw the special on the website and you can have a free breakfast for 2 people if you book 2 or more nights!

Noo Google Map

Noo Google Map has been used as the location map on the contact page. It works well responsively, looks great and is easy to set up.

Slideshow CK

Used on many of the other websites I have built, Slideshow CK is a favourite because it works well responsively, is W3C compliant and uses lazy loading so that only the first image is loaded when the page loads initially.

Search Engine Optimisation

As usual, basic on-site SEO has been completed using standard Joomla search engine friendly URLs, unique page titles, meta description and meta keywords for each page.

Feel the Quality

Checking the score in the Nibbler test tool reveals a score of 8.7 which I am fairly pleased with.