Welcome to SunsetCities.com.
The first incarnation of this web site was developed in late 1997 and
launched in 1998. The idea behind the first incarnation of SunsetCities
was to show the cities in the Las Vegas Valley at sunset. The sunsets in
the Las Vegas Valley are a sight to behold The second part of the domain
name comes from a domain naming trend that was popular in the years
before the turn of this century - calling everything "cities".
The was (and is) Geocities and dozens of this and that cities. Why buck
the trend? We had no idea that we would still be around so many years
after the site was launched.
The reason SunsetCities has survived because the domain name and theme
are sufficiently vague so as to allow the content to be flexible. The
first reincarnation of SunsetCities came in 1999, when we became a photo
site. We focused on the cool places in and around Las Vegas and posted
photos that showed these places in a complimentary light. We still carry
these photos and you can still view them at Red
Rock Canyon, Valley of
Fire, Hoover Dam
and at other places throughout this site.
The next year, 2000, we began to present information about the
apartments in Las Vegas and Reno
apartments for rent. The idea was that if we were successful in
getting good placement in Google for the search term "Las Vegas
apartments" we could charge advertising fees and this would
generate some revenue. We succeeded in getting great rankings in Google.
We were number 1 for seven years for that search term. The odd thing
about this was that we could not get the apartment complexes that we
promoted to pay us, even when we had an agreement. There are two ironies
in this. First we saw that apartment complexes preferred to pay larger
companies a lot of money to advertise them even though they had a lower
ranking. The next irony was that the companies that we did have
agreements with were chronically late in their payments. The irony is
that these same companies would not hesitate to evict their tenants if
they were late in their rental payments.
After seven years of this we gave up on trying to deal apartment
companies. Their lack of support for a local company that was ranked
number one was hard to fathom but we moved on. We moved into the hotel
reservation business. We found a reservation system that was secure and
allowed us to provide the lowest possible prices for hotel rooms. We
compared the rates that we were able to charge with what other web sites
charged and our rates were either the same or lower.
In order to distinguish our web site from the many others we focused on
showing visitors the amenities available at each property. While many
web sites focused on reviews we felt that reviews were often unreliable
given that we were able to review places that we had not even stayed at.
Reviews are often conflicting and a good or bad review is listed
possibly long after the issue was resolved or other issues had come up.
Reviews are a great way to build ginormous web sites but how much they
really help people is difficult to measure. We also added online chat.
This feature lets the visitor communicate with a reservation agent to
get the latest best deals, more information and to book group rates.
Online chat also adds a personal touch that other web sites do not. We
have a toll free 800 number and offering customers three ways to make a
reservation, online, phone, chat, adds value to the visitors experience.
Currently we are building our hotel pages and this takes a long time.
Many of these pages are done, many are not. The pages that we were using
in many places have dead links because the system we use changed have
information is retrieved. This was done in an effort to make the process
faster and more accurate. We should be done updating all links and
adding new properties sometime in 2011. This is an enormous effort as
there are more than 45,000 properties that we have to build around.
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