Sisters Sri Lanka
Rooms inland. A café steps from the beach.
A guesthouse, a villa and a vegetarian café that people already loved, with no brand and no website of its own. I gave it a name to stand under and a site that takes guests straight to the sisters.
- Type
- Client: four rooms, a villa, a café and a shop
- Where · Year
- Kabalana, Ahangama · 2026
- Services
- Brand identity · Website · Copy · Technical SEO
01Origin
Loved, and nowhere of its own
Burcu and Burçin, two sisters from Istanbul, came to Ahangama in 2019 and stayed.
By 2026 they had four rooms, a villa, a fully vegetarian café, a small shop and fourteen women from the village on the payroll. 417 Google reviews at 4.9. Fourteen thousand people following along on Instagram.
What they didn't have was a website, or a brand. Instagram was the shopfront. Bookings came through Airbnb and Booking.com, and the platforms took a cut of every one.
02The brief
A village home, poured with care
The brief asked for a place that feels lived in, not a resort.
The benchmarks were Kip and Mellow, both in Sri Lanka. Sisters had to sit warmer and more storied than either. The timeline was six to eight weeks.
Authentic
Considered, never corporate. Not polished for its own sake.
Community and craft
Local women, local produce, made by hand.
Open-hearted
Dogs, kids and solo travellers all welcome. Nothing precious.
A cross-cultural table
Turkish, Mediterranean and Sri Lankan, without clashing.
03The world
Two doors, eight hundred metres apart
The rooms sit inland on a quiet lane. The café is 800 metres away, twenty metres back from the beach at Kabalana.
A guesthouse asks you to commit: dates, names, how many. A café asks nothing except that you turn up before four. Opposite jobs, and they don't share a page well. So the site runs at two speeds under one roof.
Walk it
Drag along the lane from the guesthouse gate to the café. The page changes what it asks of you on the way.
Sleep
Your own door. Four rooms and a villa, prices on the page, dates and a name. Confirmed by email within a day.
Eat and Shop
A table by the beach. The hours, the menu and the walk, then the page gets out of the way.
- Three namesSisters Sri Lanka above, Sisters Away for the rooms and Sisters Kabalana for the café. Someone can arrive at the café and never meet the guesthouse, so each stands on its own doorstep while the type and spacing stay identical.
- The rule bookShort lines, plain facts, the place's own photographs, and nothing that makes a village home look like a resort.
04Identity
Two peacocks, and a second read
They had a name and nothing under it. Trading since 2019, 417 reviews deep, and nothing to put on a cup.
The peacock wasn't the first animal on the table. A monkey came close, until it didn't: in Sri Lanka the monkey reads as a pest, not a symbol. The peacock won partly because it was already there. Peacocks are common around Ahangama, and a couple still turn up on the guesthouse roof. Partly, too, because of what they mean locally: elegant, royal. The fourteen women who work there confirmed it landed.
The drawing is two peacocks facing each other inside an arch, with a second read underneath: the two sisters. SISTERS above, SRI LANKA below, Sinhala either side, ESTD 2019 between their feet. The year they started, not the year I drew it.
Rust, the primary
On cups, menus and the website. The mark that stands for all three businesses.
Hand-painted on the wall
The wordmark
The menu
Poster
On creamOn the cups
At the tableThe old gate, for nowPick things up. Everything here is in use.
Two tiers, from the discovery work: a questionnaire, a guest avatar, then reference images the sisters reacted to. Tap to copy.
Everyday
Light weight. Real candidates were set side by side until one matched the crest's quiet formality instead of competing with it.
Hours, prices, buttons, the small print. The supporting work.
05The website
Sleep, Eat, Shop: one roof, two speeds
Each part of the site answers the one question a visitor brings to it.
Sleep
Can I stay, and when? Four rooms and Sanda Villa, prices shown, a live calendar for each.
Slows you downEat
What, when, and how do I get there? Hours, the 800 metre walk, the menu.
Gets out of the wayShop
Can I take some home? The showroom behind the café.
A few photographsFind us
Which door is which? Both pins on one map, 800 metres apart.
The mapBook
Dates and a name, or a message on WhatsApp.
Every screenThe café, on Kabalana time
The take-away corner opens at 06:30 for the early surfers. The café sits down from eight until four. The site gives the hours in plain words, so nobody walks 800 metres to a closed door.
The strip below reads the time in Kabalana right now and works out what's open.
Take-away
06:30 to 13:00. Coffee, pastries, fresh bites to go.
…The café
08:00 to 16:00. Brunch, à la carte, unhurried.
…The shop
08:00 to 16:00, behind the café.
…Dates and a name
Pick the room or the villa, the guests and the nights. Prices are on the page before you ask, with the Google rating beside them. The sisters confirm by email within 24 hours, and a deposit by bank transfer holds the dates.
Try it. Nothing is sent from this page.
Send a booking enquiry.
Rated 4.9 by 417 guests on Google
Seasonal rate confirmed by email within 24 hours. Deposit by bank transfer, the rest on arrival.
Found by the right name
Structured data tells Google, and the AI assistants that read it, which listing is the guesthouse and which is the café, with real hours and the real menu in rupees. The page title names the brand and the place.
HTTPS with HSTS, real 404s, no sideways scroll on phones. The founders' portrait went from 1.86 MB to 127 KB, and the hero film from 49.7 MB to 2.5.
06Writing and handover
Their voice, cut to size
Small places get talked up. This one doesn't need it.
None of it started with me. Burcu and Burçin gave me the material, what they wanted said and how they'd say it, and I wrote and rewrote from there. Short lines, plain facts, no adjectives doing work the place already does.
Only five places to stay. They go quickly.
Turkish breakfast, all morning long.
Two sisters from Istanbul who never went home.
Small by intention. Considered by design.
Six months, then the keys
They asked me to stay on, so I run the site for six months. The domain and hosting are already theirs. Then it moves to an editor they drive themselves: prices, dates, photographs, words. The handover is a date in the diary, not a promise.
07How it was made
Human-directed, AI-produced
I set the direction, made the calls, and checked every word against the sisters.
| Part | Tools | My role |
|---|---|---|
| Crest and wordmark | Drawn by me | Designed, three colourways |
| Guest avatar | Perplexity (research) | Questionnaire with the sisters, then wrote the avatar |
| Colour references | Gemini (AI-generated reference images) | Directed, then chose with the sisters |
| Photography | Siriwan Champorn, and the sisters' own photos | Selected and sequenced |
| Menu and image renders | Higgsfield (AI-generated) | Art direction |
| Hero film | Higgsfield (an AI montage of real photos) | Directed, cut for desktop and phone |
| Writing | Aaron & Claude assisted, from the sisters' own material | Wrote, rewrote |
| Testing | A simulated 200-visitor panel, a 10-site benchmark, an SEO and GEO audit | Chose what to fix and what not to |
- The monkeyIn Sri Lanka it reads as a pest.
- Palm fronds and forest greenThe brief suggested a green, botanical badge. The discovery work pointed warm, and the peacock was already on the roof.
- A booking engine called a choiceDirect booking isn't live because their payment account isn't open yet. The site takes enquiries and says so, rather than calling a form a philosophy.
- Claims the site can't backAn earlier draft of this page mentioned integrations and results that don't exist. They came out.
08Testing
200 visitors, and the fixes that went live
I put the live site in front of 200 simulated visitors, 25 from each of eight audiences, to find out who it works for and where it breaks.
The panel was synthetic: AI personas built to match surfers, digital nomads, families, groups of friends, café-goers, Turkish visitors, boutique hospitality owners and sceptics who always book through a platform. They judged the live text and 33 real screenshots, 23 of them on phones. It's directional, not a substitute for real guests.
noticed any rating at all, though 4.9 from 417 reviews beats every site in the benchmark. Those who saw it trusted the site more: 7.4 out of 10, against 6.6.
● one visitor who noticed the rating
- The look worksEvery group rated it highest. The food photography was praised 87 times. Favourite sections: the rooms, the café, the story.
- Booking was the gap61 of 200 would still book through a platform, and 70 were undecided.
- A dead end45 tapped the WhatsApp link, which went to a placeholder number. Their trust fell to 6.2, against 7.0.
- Search saw a different caféThe data Google read listed dishes the café doesn't serve, priced in dollars.
Seven fixes
- WhatsApp goes to the real number, and sits beside the enquiry form.
- "Rated 4.9 by 417 guests on Google", under every room price.
- The real menu in rupees, in the data Google reads.
- The hero film from 49.7 MB to 2.5, with a portrait cut for phones.
- The privacy policy rewritten for an enquiry form.
- "Can I cancel?" answered in one line, and the terms match how guests pay.
- The title names the brand and the place; photos moved to WebP.
The look, and the booking engine
The look stays: every group rated it highest. A real booking engine is the fix for the 4.4, and it waits on their payment account, so it's a second job, not a same-day tweak. So is a page each for the rooms, the villa and the café. And no hand-drawn layer until there are real drawings: three design-loop rounds proved lines drawn in code read as icons.
Testing informs the work; it doesn't write it.
09Timeline
Five weeks, against a brief of six to eight
2019
Sisters opens in Ahangama
5 Aug 2026
Brief agreed: brand, site, copy and SEO in six to eight weeks
Aug 2026
Discovery: questionnaire, guest avatar, colour references
The monkey out, the peacock in.
7 Sep 2026
Site live at sisterssrilanka.com
21 Sep 2026
Brand package delivered: crest in three colourways, wordmark, palette, type
27 Sep 2026
Site review: 200-visitor panel, 10-site benchmark, SEO and GEO audit, three design-loop rounds
5 Oct 2026
The panel's fixes go live, and the sisters' review comes in
10Where it stands
Found first, by name
Sisters Away holds 4.9 across 129 Google reviews. Sisters Kabalana holds 4.9 across 288.
The site ranks first for the café and second for the guesthouse, above their own Instagram and every aggregator, and the description Google shows is the one written for it. Figures read from Google, September 2026. I'm not claiming I caused that; rankings depend on a lot of things.
Next: the crest gets cast for the gate, direct booking opens with their payment account, and the brand rolls on to cups, tees and stickers.
“Aaron completely understood the task and came up with a design we instantly loved.”
Burcu & Burçin, founders, Sisters Sri LankaWe own a coffee shop and a boutique hotel on the southern coast of Sri Lanka. When we started in 2019, it was a very small operation, but over time, Sisters Sri Lanka grew, and so did the competition. We realized we needed a strong logo and professional branding, which we never had before, as well as a website to connect directly with our customers instead of relying solely on third-party platforms.
We reached out to BOH.digital, explained our needs, and shared what we were aiming for. The process was super smooth. He was super attentive to details and put his absolute best into the entire process.
As Sisters Sri Lanka, we are so happy with the results and happily recommend BOH.digital!
What it means for your business
Loved but unreachable is fixable
If guests find you on Instagram and pay a platform to book, a site of your own is the shortest route to keeping that commission.
One roof, several doors
A guesthouse, a café and a shop can share a brand without sharing a page.
A mark that means something locally
Pick the symbol your staff and neighbours recognise, not the one on a mood board.
Your voice, tidied
The best lines come from the owners. My job is to cut them to size.
You own it
Domain and hosting in your name, and a handover date in the diary.
People already love your place? Let's give them a way in.
- Brand, direction and build
- Aaron Reilly
- Writing
- Aaron Reilly, assisted by Claude, from the sisters' own material
- Photography
- Siriwan Champorn and the sisters; renders made with Higgsfield
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