Lahaina.com has Launched!
The day we have been waiting for since mid-2008 has finally arrived. Neptune Ventures is proud to announce the launch of Lahaina.com!
Lahaina is the main tourist destination in Maui and the second largest destination (after Waikiki) in all of Hawaii. Over 2 million visitors a year go to Maui with a majority of them going through Lahaina. The city is known for its giant Banyan Tree, the Front Street food and nightlife, and the sheltered weather of Maui’s West side.
The new site design is meant to appeal to visitors and locals alike. While visitors drive the commerce in the city, the locals provide the true flavor of Maui. The site contains a blog by locals, a directory of all local businesses, a forum for everyone, tons of informational content, and many great features such as maps, weather, surf reports, news, and more.
Going forward, we have many projects for Lahaina.com growth in the works. The site needs SEO improvement, even though it was developed to be SEO-friendly. Prior to that, we need to get more of our content on there. In terms of tools, we are adding a very cool Maps tool connecting to all of our businesses in the directory. Most importantly, we are looking to expand our local content by partnering up with local writers to provide Maui news and opinion journalism. Of course, advertising sales are also in progress.
In terms of marketing, we are making a strong push with the Social Media tools. We have created a Facebook page and group where we are updating our content and beginning to interact with users. We have created a Flickr group where we our users upload their photos and we choose a Photo of the Month for our home page. We have other tools in the works as well, such as Twitter, but the most important aspect of these social media tools are using them correctly. We have put a lot of time into understanding the benefits of each and how users prefer to interact with a publisher such as ours.
On top of that, Michael was featured in the Associated Cities Q&A this month regarding our launch!
We encourage everyone to have a look, become a member of our site, and give us any feedback you may have. We built the site off of suggestions from others and we do not plan to stop taking advice now.
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Congrats on the launch, enjoyed the time I spent in Lahaina a few years back.
The timing is great to develop a name like this. Good Luck!
Thanks Bruce. Let us know if you ever head back there!
I like the layout. Nice job! Is it a custom skin or modified WP theme? If so, which one?
Congrats!
Rob L.
Thank you. It’s a custom design. Not a WordPress site, although the blog is an embedded WordPress blog.
Fantastic site. Looking forward to seeing the development take place.
Congrats, looks great, it will be very interesting to watch it grow.
Good luck
Congrats, Conor! The site looks great!
Great job on the site Conor!
That’s one of the nicest geo sites I’ve ever come across. I can imagine the amount of work that went into it.
The Neptune team must be extremely proud – you’ve certainly added tons of value to the domain. Nice work!
All the best with the new version!
Colin
Thanks Colin, and thank you everyone else. Really appreciate the kind words!
I just finally got a chance to checkout your site, and was very impressed. You guys did some great work on that site. I remember at the Chicago GeoDomain Expo last year, when you had acquired it. Great job on what you’ve done with it. Congrats.
Wow! What a fabulous design Conor. You guys look like you are ready to take Hawaii by storm. What an awesome interface and fantastic features… Totally user-friendly! I ran across another site that looks like you must have your hands in it… checkitouthawaii. Is that you guys too? Man, you really deserve big props. Great work on it all by you guys! Looking at all this makes me miss Hawaii so much. My wife and I honeymooned in Kanepalli years ago. I hope we can get back there again.
Thanks Dave. Our designers had down checkitouthawaii before ours, so yes, the quality design work is related.