Exotiq has been selling property in Bali since 2002. They're the oldest premium agency on the island, and the one W Hotel, Six Senses, Aman and Como trust with their exclusive listings.

Almost none of that came across on their old website. It ran on WordPress, and it had reached the point where the site was working against the business rather than for it. Pages were slow. The backend was awkward enough that the marketing team put off updating it. The design had drifted out of sync with itself, and on a phone it fell apart — which matters when your buyers are browsing from a sofa in Sydney or Paris.

If you're a foreigner buying in Bali, the first thing you run into is that you often can't own land outright. So every listing carries a distinction between freehold and leasehold, and if it's leasehold, how many years are left on it. Prices are in rupiah — figures in the billions that mean nothing to someone thinking in euros. And nobody searches for "property"; they search for Canggu, or Ubud, or beachfront.

So the site had two jobs. Make a genuinely complicated purchase feel legible to someone browsing from another continent. And be findable in the first place — Exotiq wanted to lean less on paid ads and more on people finding them through search.

Jules Davies led the SEO structure and strategy, and we built the sitemap around it rather than around Exotiq's internal org chart. That meant real pages for the things buyers actually type into Google — villas in Bali, apartments in Bali, and so on across regions and property types — each one a proper page with its own content, not just a filtered view with a URL attached.

The visual direction stayed deliberately quiet. A restrained palette, generous spacing, consistent templates. On a property site the photography is the product, and the interface's job is to get out of its way. This time it was designed for a phone first.

The filtering system took the longest and I'm the most pleased with it. A buyer can narrow by region, villa or land, freehold or leasehold, years remaining on the lease, price, bedrooms, land size, building size, and tags like beachfront. That's a lot of dimensions to hold together on one page without it falling over, and getting the combinations to behave took a long stretch of building and testing with Finsweet.

It was worth it. Years later it's still running, and Exotiq keeps adding listings to it without anything breaking.

Currency was easier and matters more than it sounds. Prices now convert live through Monto, so a buyer sees a number they can actually react to instead of Rp 15,600,000,000.

For the migration, I reformatted the existing listings into the new CMS fields, and from there the Exotiq team took over adding new ones themselves. The rest of the site was rebuilt from the ground up, content included.

Exotiq wanted a search bar in the homepage hero: type what you're after, land on the listings page already filtered. Good idea. It was also past what I could build alone at the time, so I asked a developer friend to write it.

It worked. But it was brittle — every change to the listings structure meant going back into custom code that wasn't mine. A few months after launch we agreed to drop it. It wasn't earning the maintenance it demanded.

I'd approach it differently today; the tooling has moved on a lot and so have I. But the real lesson wasn't technical. A feature the client can't maintain without phoning someone isn't really theirs. Everything else on that site, they still run themselves.

Premium, minimal visual identity aligned with Exotiq’s position as a leading Bali luxury agency.

New UX structure and sitemap with clear paths by region, property type, and keyword.

SEO‑ready landing pages for key regions and topics, also used for paid campaigns.

Advanced property filtering, custom search, and multi‑currency support for international buyers.

Custom Webflow CMS for properties, locations, and blog content, fully manageable by the client.

Fast, mobile‑friendly experience replacing a slow, hard‑to‑maintain WordPress site.

‍

The SEO pages did what they were built to do. Someone searches for villas in Bali, lands on a page made for exactly that search, and comes into the site from there — traffic Exotiq isn't paying for every time.

The marketing team stopped waiting on developers. They add listings, publish articles, and launch new region pages on their own.

And the filtering still works, years on, on a site with a lot of listings and a lot of variables. On this kind of project that's the result I'd point at first.

UX strategy, sitemap and wireframes, visual design, and the full Webflow build, including the filtering, search and currency setup. Jules Davies led SEO structure and strategy. Designed in Figma, built in Webflow, with Finsweet for filtering and Monto for live currency conversion.