My client owns a medium sized apartment complex in Silicon Valley in an area that has many similarly sized and situated apartment complexes. The vast majority of apartment hunters check rental listings at Craigslist.org so we had created a series of eye-catching ads with HTML layouts. (Check out those apartment rental ads here.) At the time, Craigslist allowed a limited subset of HTML tags, so it was difficult to achieve a magazine style look, but we did it and were very successful at attracting prospective renters.

A few years later, Craigslist tightened their restrictions and it became more difficult even to get an HTML ad displayed in the rental section. So we moved to a new strategy, which was to put a text only ad in Craigslist, with a link pointing to the full color ad containing apartment interior and exterior slide shows, Q&A sections and more.

Those full ads were hosted on pages of this new website, accessible only by links from Craigslist. When there are no apartments up for rent, the only thing site visitors can access is the contact page and the home page.

Any one of the ads for a given apartment (we use four different ad styles, with different layouts and narratives) will include photo gallery slideshow pages (with the slideshows configured to adapt to mobile device as well as desktop screens.)