We rebuilt the website. Here's what changed.
The old site was a starting point. The new one is what we wished we had on day one. Faster, more honest, and built around the question 'what would actually help?'
*Written in May 2026, at the launch of friday.mu v3. The site you're reading is the one we ship at the end of this story.*
The old friday.mu was a Figma Make page that did the job for the first eighteen months. It listed the residences, took requests, pointed at our phone number, and was honest about the fact that the booking happened on a call. As the portfolio grew and the questions we were getting from guests grew with it, the limits showed. By the end of last year we were sending the same three paragraphs over WhatsApp to four different guests a week; the answer was a journal, not a longer reply template.
We wanted three things from the rebuild. One: real availability and real prices on every listing, pulled live from our property-management system, never a stale photo. Two: a way to ask the team a question in plain language and get a useful answer that isn't a dropdown menu, isn't a chatbot pretending to be human, and isn't a contact form that disappears into a queue. Three: a journal, so the things we end up explaining twenty times a year live in one place where they can be linked, shared, and improved.
All three are now in. The residences page reads from our live calendar; the per-day pricing you see is what you will be quoted. If a price changes after you start a booking, we tell you why before we take a deposit. The Ask Friday box on the home page is wired to the same brain we use internally to triage incoming requests; it will point you at three places that fit, on a map, and tell you honestly when something doesn't fit rather than making something up. The journal is where this article sits.
We also published the property-management terms in plain English and in French. Owners considering Friday can read what we charge, what we include, and what we don't, before the call, not after. We had spent two years explaining the same fee structure on phone calls; the page is six minutes' reading and answers the questions in the order owners actually ask them. The number of phone-call hours saved per signed property is significant, and the conversations we now have are about the residence, not the contract.
A few smaller things we put in deliberately. A dark mode that respects your system preference and stays put when you toggle it. A French version that is a proper translation, not a Google Translate pass; both languages are written by people who speak them. Photos that are real photos of the residences (no stock images masquerading as ours; we tag the stock images in the journal explicitly as illustration). A search bar on the residences page that filters by what people actually search for (a pool, a sea view, dog-friendly, room for the in-laws) rather than by what is easy to tag.
The things we deliberately did not put in. No popup, banner, or chat-bubble assistant pretending to be human. No 'someone in Paris just booked this villa' urgency manipulation. No countdown timers. No mandatory newsletter signup. No social-media login. No Like and Share buttons; if you want to share an article, you can copy the link, and that has worked fine since 1994. The cookie banner is the legal minimum, and you can decline it without finding the decline button behind two screens of dark patterns.
On speed. The site is built on Next.js and runs on a single small server. Most pages weigh less than 200kB on first load, which means it is fast on a Mauritian 4G connection on the beach, fast on a French DSL in February, and fast on a phone with a tired battery. We test on actual phones from actual locations. If the homepage takes more than a second to render on a mid-range Android over 4G, we treat it as a bug.
On honesty. Every number on the site is one we can defend. The portfolio count is pulled from the current site catalogue where we show it; we don't round the number up for marketing. The response-time claim is what the team actually hits, not the headline version. Where we cite a tourism statistic, we name the source. The bar we set ourselves is: would we be embarrassed if a guest asked us to back this up? If yes, we change the copy.
We track usage to fix the site, and when marketing tools are configured we use them only behind cookie consent. That means analytics and advertising pixels are separated, visitors can reject marketing cookies, and we do not sell identifiable guest information.
