"Web Design in Santa Teresa: What Makes a Website Convert International Visitors?"

A business in Santa Teresa sells to people who aren't there yet.

They're on a sofa in Toronto or Berlin, several thousand kilometres away and a good many hours off your clock, deciding between you and four other tabs. They've never met you and they won't ring to check. The site has to carry the whole conversation.

Most of what follows comes from that.

They're deciding about the place first

Before anyone wonders whether your surf camp is good, they want to know what it's actually like down there. A homepage that opens on a price list is answering a question they haven't reached yet.

Show the place: the walk to the water, the road, the afternoon light, what you hear at six. Then what you offer. Then let them book.

Two languages, read by a human

English does most of the work for international visitors on that coast, Spanish is the language of the country, and plenty of visitors arrive with neither as a first language.

Two well-written languages will serve you better than four machine-translated ones. An unreviewed translation shows immediately, and it undoes the confidence the rest of the page has built. If you do one thing here, have a native speaker read the English out loud.

Three practical things that get skipped

Currency. Prices in colones alone make someone do arithmetic at the exact moment they're deciding. Showing dollars alongside removes that.

Getting there. Santa Teresa takes some reaching: a ferry or a long drive from the airport. Somebody planning from abroad will look for that answer before they commit, and a page that explains it plainly is doing sales work.

Reaching you. Say which messaging app you actually answer and roughly when. A form landing in an inbox checked twice a week loses bookings from a timezone where the sender is asleep by the time you read it.

The connection isn't what you have at home

Coverage in rural Costa Rica is real but uneven, and a visitor on the beach with two bars is an ordinary case.

Images are almost always what makes a page slow. A photo straight off a camera weighs several megabytes; ten of them on a homepage make a site unusable on a weak signal. Compressing them properly takes an afternoon and is usually the single biggest gain available.

Trust, when nobody can verify you

Someone about to send a deposit across the world looks for signals, mostly without noticing.

Photographs that are clearly yours rather than bought. A physical address and a phone number that works. Recent reviews. A page with a face on it. Cancellation terms visible before the payment step rather than after.

None of that is styling, and all of it is why people press the button.

Your images are the part that can't be copied

Everyone on that coast shares the same scenery, and it's beautiful, which is exactly why it isn't what distinguishes you.

Your entrance, your terrace at six, the path down to the sand, the person who runs the place: that's the material that makes a site recognisable.

It's also why I film and build in the same project. The footage is shot knowing where it will sit on the page, in what format and for how long, instead of arriving afterwards and being made to fit. I built my own set of dynamic modules for the sites I make, which is what lets me work to a seven-day delivery.

Something worth doing this week

Open your own site on a phone, outdoors, on mobile data, as though you'd never seen it. Count the seconds before you understand what the business is and where it is.

Whatever that number is, it's the brief.

I'm moving to Santa Teresa in September and I'll be building sites there. If you want to see how I work, it's here.