The brief
Valena Apartmani rents two apartments on Divčibare, a mountain resort in western Serbia, to guests booking a weekend or week away near the ski slopes and hiking trails. Unlike the tree-service work in this portfolio, this wasn’t a rebuild — there was no existing site to replace, no SEO history to protect. The brief was to get a fast, credible booking site live from nothing, and drive guests to it directly with paid social, since that’s where this kind of short-term-rental audience in Serbia actually books from.
Built from scratch on Astro
I built the whole site on Astro: a single-property, single-purpose site with no CMS or blog to maintain, so Astro made sense the same way it does everywhere else in this portfolio — static pages, no JavaScript framework tax, fast on a phone on 4G at a ski resort with patchy signal. It ships 10 pages total: a homepage, an about page, an activities page, two apartment detail pages, and the usual contact and legal pages — deliberately small, because a two-apartment rental doesn’t need more than that to convert a visitor into a reservation.
A run against the live site:
The technical SEO is complete. Every page has its own title and description, a correct canonical address, Open Graph tags for sharing and alt text on every image. The site ships a sitemap, a robots.txt and schema.org structured data describing the property and each apartment, so Google reads it as an accommodation business rather than a set of pages. Search still isn’t the acquisition channel here — Instagram and Facebook ads are — but anyone who looks Valena up by name lands on a site search engines understand.
A booking system instead of a link to a spreadsheet
The one piece of real product work on this project is the reservation flow. Instead of routing every visitor to an external booking platform or a “message us on WhatsApp” link, I built a popup that asks which apartment the guest wants — Valena 1 or Valena 2 — then drops them straight into that unit’s own reservation form, each with its own availability and amenities already loaded. It’s a small piece of UI, but it’s the difference between a visitor bouncing off a generic contact form and one who finishes a booking in the same session they clicked the ad.
Facebook and Instagram, with the tracking to prove it
The growth channel here is paid and organic social, not search. I set up a Meta Pixel across the site and wired a Lead event into the booking flow itself, so every reservation started through the popup reports back to Meta Ads as a conversion — the campaigns optimise toward people who actually open a booking form, not just anyone who lands on the homepage. That feedback loop is what makes Instagram and Facebook worth running as the primary channel for a property this size, instead of competing for search rankings a two-apartment rental doesn’t have the content budget to win.
Results
This is a small, single-property site, and I’m keeping the results section honest about that: there’s no ad-spend or lead-volume table here the way there is for the tree-service accounts, because the ongoing spend and booking numbers belong to a much smaller, newer campaign than those. What’s real and checkable is the site itself — live, fast, and built to turn a paid-social click into a finished reservation in one sitting.
