Seaira Dives

Seaira Dives

OVERVIEW

Seaira Dives is a scuba diving training and travel company that offers beginners and advanced scuba diving training and organizes trips to dive destinations.

Founded by Ciara Michaud, a scuba dive instructor and world traveler whose mission is to provide women, minorities, individuals with disabilities, and veterans a safe, comfortable training environment and group travel centered around scuba diving, wellness, and environmental awareness.

DESIGN STARTS WITH STRATEGY

Evelyn first met Ciara last spring when she wanted to become Advanced Water certified during her dive trip to Belize, July of 2023. Ciara was the trip organizer, leader and the dive instructor and was incredibly organized before, during and after the trip.

Evelyn was seriously impressed because she has gone on scuba diving travel adventures in the past and knows what it takes to lead a group of varied skilled divers with differing physical abilities for an entire week in a foreign country... uh, not easy.

Ciara, an army vet, has the experience having traveled the world scuba diving for over 15 years doing more than 2,000 dives! She decided to start her own dive training and travel business while working as a dive instructor for a local area dive shop when she realized their values were different hers and she wanted to have more control over how to offer her services and with who.

Ciara had put together a WIX site but after she decided that she wanted to create an online presence that she could build upon, she’d need a professionally branded website. One that is set up correctly with built-in functionality (contact forms, email marketing, appointment scheduling, commerce, etc.).

We strategized her primary services with our Power Plan, a 90-minute Zoom call deep-dive interview. Then, we got to work with content creation and design!

GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE

Ciara’s business name is Seaira Dives, a phonetic play on her first name that combines sea and air. She’d already purchased the domain name and we advised her to also set up a professional Gmail (Google Workspace Starter Plan) with the domain name, which we helped verify with the DNS records.

Her company is located in Maryland and she’s planning on providing local services in the DMV (DC, Maryland, and Virginia) area, so we set up a Google Business Profile to help her site get traffic with local SEO (search engine optimization).

We set up and verified her Google Business Profile listing, added the most relevant scuba instructor category, added business info and her new logo, and advised her on how to fill out the profile and get reviews. Check out our guide on how to set up your Google Business Profile.

CONTENT WRITING

Since Evelyn has been a scuba diver for years, we felt confident writing the website content. We also gleaned info from Ciara’s WIX site, her business plan, and also had her fill out a brand journal. We also got inspiration from her Instagram account.

We usually start with a sitemap to identify what needs to be written. The home page gets done first, then the primary navigation pages, additional pages, and off-page SEO, including keyword-specific page titles and meta descriptions to help her new business rank higher in search engines.

We also exported/imported her blog posts, renamed the blog posts for better SEO, formatted the posts, added URL redirects, edited the settings (URLs, excerpts, categories, tags), and overall improved the structure of the blog (including image optimization—sizing, file naming, alt text, and captions)!

Need help structuring and writing website copy for SEO and with best practices? Check out our guide on writing website content.

CUSTOM BRAND PHOTOGRAPHY

Ciara had many photos from past dive trips, so we selected the best shots, optimized the images for the web, and placed them in the best areas depending on the written content and pages.

We wanted to incorporate video content, so we created custom GIFs from a few of her Instagram reels in the website's footer.

We hope to continually add fresh visual content to the website as Ciara does more training classes and travel and maybe get a photo of her on land!

WEB DESIGN

For the homepage hero image, we combined three stock photos. The sky, waterline, and water below with a photo of the fish, coral, and ocean floor, with a third photo using a female scuba diver that resembles Ciara.

We created custom silhouette coral reef section dividers that give a really unique brand look and feel. And, on the home page added advanced scroll animation on silhouetted diver illustrations so it looks like they are swimming around the page! As the visitor scrolls down, the tonality of the page gets darker as the coral and marine life change just like it does when diving!

To read about the Seaira Dives logo, go to our logo case study.

WEB BUILD AND APPOINTMENT SCHEDULING

The website design and build focused on building out the main foundational pages (home, services, about), integral functionality for Ciara’s new business, and getting her site set up for marketing.

We helped Ciara figure out how to structure her two main services, training classes and travel trips. Since her business is brand new and she’s still figuring out some behind-the-scenes planning, in the meantime we created segmented mailing list waitlists to keep building momentum and engagement while things are being planned.

We highlighted her extensive background in scuba dive instructing, education, and training and built an epic about page. Other pages we built include the blog, posts pages, contact page, reviews page, email waitlist pages, link in bio page, 404 page, visual style guide, and legal pages.

We incorporated marine life and travel emojis into her brand because they matched the logo aesthetic and made her brand as fun as she is!

We embedded a third-party functionality code from WeTravel, her travel trip booking company. We set up and trained Ciara on Acuity, Squarespace’s built-in appointment scheduler. This is how she will set up classes, take payments, and automate email notifications.

We also set up her email marketing using Squarespace Campaigns and built out an email template. The Commerce setup is in the works. Finally, we provide website training to make sure she’s confident in managing the site.

A lot of thinking, planning, and strategizing goes into a business website and it’s never done. But now Ciara has a solid foundation in her custom website she can build upon, market and sell with and be truly proud of!