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Let’s face it, the typical vacation rental or B&B just isn’t going to have the marketing budget of Renaissance Hotels and therefore you’re likely to have to tone down your proposal to the advertising executive looking after your account. Of course, chances are, you are the advertising executive and it’s your own place that you’re marketing.

Now, you might think that this means you’ll not be able to produce something quite so classy as the Renaissance campaign and, on the whole, that’s probably true. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t produce something similarly effective and memorable for your own place, albeit on a much smaller scale than the Renaissance campaign.

This image is one composed with a great deal of care with each element of it representing some aspect of Renaissance Hotels in general or of a specific Renaissance Hotel. Thus, we have the two hotel staff on the left representing the high level of service on offer in the hotels and carrying appropriately exotic looking dishes for the guest. Then there’s the individual attention from the pool guy offering the towel on the right. The pool is from their hotel at Seaworld and from the Hamburg hotel we have the arched building in the background. Right in the middle, of course, we have the most important aspect of the composition which is the representative hotel guest. The overall message is that you can expect elegant surroundings with personal service when you stay at a Renaissance hotel.

Obviously all that is specific to their hotel chain and clearly a lot of work went into creating the composition (this is only one of a number of images which they used in the campaign). Whilst you’re probably not going to produce something quite so sophisticated you can follow their principle of reflecting your message throughout your own marketing. They’ve emphasized elegance and service, what are you going to emphasize?

For example, say you have a luxurious chateau then make sure that in every image you use there’s a hint of that luxury. Perhaps by something as simple as a Louis XIV chair in the photo of the pool, or the Mercedes parked in front of the entrance. The idea is that you follow through on your core message of “a hint of luxury”. Or perhaps, your message is that yours is the place for outdoor persuits. In that case, each image should contain something hinting at one of those. The racing bike resting against the wall, the hikers heading off down the path, etc.

Doing this isn’t always as difficult as it might first appear. However, the key thing is to be clear on what message you want to get across. Once that’s clear in your mind you’ll be able to make the small changes in the images that you take which are required to get a consistent message across to potential guests.

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One of the perennial issues when you take over an existing business is whether or not you should put up an “Under New Management” sign or not.

If previous owners were putting off guests then you probably should put one up. After all, people may decide to book somewhere else based on all the bad reviews that your place had been getting (if this seems likely, you should also change the name).

However, in the majority of cases, the previous owners aren’t really that bad. Putting up a sign when the previous owners were anything from average to good means that you’re likely to lose customers because some people will book because they were the owners.

Where you can come unstuck is that if your marketing image is significantly different from that of the previous owners you have effectively put up the sign anyway which is something to be wary of. You might think that your new image for the place is absolutely wonderful but the last thing you want to do is to lose the existing regulars which, in some cases I’ve seen, can amount to over 25% of the guest list each year.

It’s more difficult of course when you’re in the situation where you will be running the place significantly differently from the previous owners. In these cases you need to make it clear in your marketing what you do. For example, if the previous owners offered airport pickups but you don’t, then it might be better to state that explicitly. On the other hand, be positive about the extra things that you do as well eg if you’re an award winning chef and the previous owners weren’t then say so.

So, unless the previous owners are truly dreadful, don’t erect a sign as such but do be clear in your advertising where you differ from them.

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We’ve talked about registering your domain, getting somewhere to host it, what you need to include on the site and how to get the perfect photos. Next up is getting it written either by yourself or paying someone else to do it but before we get to that, I thought it better to start with what you shouldn’t have on the site.

The first thing you need to bear in mind is that your site is there to sell your property to prospective guests. In particular it’s not there to show off the skills of the website designer. If you’re getting someone to write it for you, remind them of that; if you’re writing it yourself, keep in mind that it’s not a showcase for your webdesign skills.

How will they find your site? To sell your property you first need the people to see your site which usually means that they will find it via a search engine. Search engines can’t read images so it’s vital that your site actually has text on it (as much as possible). There’s something of a trend for some site designers to put everything in an image (even the text) which has the effect of making the page appear completely blank to the search engines.

What’s your place look like? When they reach your site people want to see what your place is like which is where your photographs come in. These photos need to be “Internet size” which means no larger than about 300 pixels wide. If you just upload the image from your camera chances are that it’s more like 3000 pixels wide which means that the page will take around one hundred times as long to load as it should. That 100 fold increase means that instead of taking a second or two to load it will take a couple of minutes even on ADSL and possibly an hour or more on dial-up (which is still used by a lot of people). Many people just don’t have the patience for that and will look elsewhere. Large images should be accessed by clicking on the small ones but even then “large” means no wider than 800 pixels.

What’s going to be on your homepage? This is one of the most important pages of your website yet a number of people use it merely to hold a large photo of their property and “click to enter”. In practical terms, you may as well not have that page there if that’s all that’s going to be on it. Websites aren’t like brochures with a front cover: people want to arrive on real content when they go to your site.

Background image? Think plain if you’re using one. Much as the faded image of your property as background to all the text might sound great and look fantastic on your computer, you can’t depend on it looking good or the text remaining readable on other screens and, of course, a full-screen background image is massive and therefore takes ages to download.

Animations? By and large these just eat up your bandwidth and annoy readers of your site. Avoid them.

Javascript? Many people block this with the security settings so you’re eating bandwidth un-necessarily. It’s best to think “plain vanilla” for the HTML that you use as it will load much faster and work on a much wider range of setups.

Background music? Another eater of bandwidth. Personal spoken greetings fall in the same category.

Finally, remember that each page is important in its own right and people can arrive directly on any page on your site. Therefore make sure that you can reach the rest of your site no matter what page they start with. Make each page unique and you can increase the number of entries that you have on the search engines: many people use the same title and description on every page which just throws away the possibility of extra entries. You’re going to lock down your site so they can’t do that? That would be one of the worst things you can do as the search engines won’t be able to access it either and it’s seriously annoying for users of the site too.

I was going to put an image of one of the worst sites around as my photo for this post but as that would only encourage them, I’ve left it to your imagination how bad they can be: think glaring background, flashing text, menu constantly circling around the page with each menu choice animated and tune playing in the background. Hard as it may be to believe, that was all on a single website that I came across this morning for a holiday property although it was actually worse than that as they didn’t even have any text on the page “describing” their property. The images were so large that the site crashed the browser so I don’t really know what their property looks like. Oh, and the site was done by a “professional” website designer.

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