Our Inns

If you’ve been following our little series, you’ve chosen the perfect name for your place, registered the domains and picked a hosting service so “all” you need to do now is write the website.

There are three basic approaches to this which are 1) write it yourself 2) write it using a template and 3) get someone else to write it.

Writing it yourself has the advantage that you can do anything and it’ll not be a copy of any other site. However, the downside is that you need to commit yourself to updating the look & feel of the site as years go by eg you should normally totally refresh the site around every 3 to 5 years. The big upside of this is that you can make small changes as you go along which is exactly what most people need to do when they’re starting out in the business.

The template option is probably the best option for you if this is your first website. These templates come in many forms:

1. Those produced by some listings sites. For example, we produce a mini-website for you when you sign up that includes more pages than many custom websites do.
2. Those produced by companies specialising in generated websites. I don’t recommend these because your website is completely tied in to the company.
3. Those available through your hosting service. Although many of these are excellent they do tie you to that hosting service.
4. Those provided within the website design software that you use. This is the best option as you aren’t tied in to any particular hosting service.

If you’re getting someone else to write the site for you don’t think that this means you have no work to do because in almost all cases they’ll expect you to supply the bulk of the text and photos for the site. What they do is provide you with a design into which they’ll place your text and photos. Consequently, it’s often better to go for the second option as a) it’s a lot cheaper and b) it lets you make changes later without paying again.

I’ll be covering what you need to include on your site next time.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Internet, Owners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.