Our Inns

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.

Popularity: 38% [?]

This requires a lot of thinking as it’s going to be one of the major suppliers of guests for you eventually.

I’m going to be talking here about what you need to include, not how it should be included so this is equally applicable to everything from DIY sites to those that you have written for you. Don’t forget that even if you’re getting someone to write the site for you, you’ll need to provide them with the bulk of the text and photos: what they do is produce a design to slot that into.

The first thing to note is that although every property is different, guests will want to know the same basic types of information about it. So, no matter what the property is you’ll need to include this information; for very specialised properties there may be even more things that you need to say: remember that the guest knows nothing about your place that you don’t tell them!

The basic information that you need is:

1. A title. This is one of the most important pieces of text that you’ll write so spend time on it to get it as close to perfection as possible. What you’re aiming for is to have all the appropriate keywords within the first 60 characters or so as that’s what people will see on their searches and when they arrive on your site. Unless the name of your place is very descriptive don’t waste characters by including it as few people will search for you by name.
2. An overall description of your place. Spend time on this as it’s one of the more important sections because it’ll be used as the introduction. You should try to include the specific attractions of your place in the first sentence or two as it’s very important to catch the attention quickly. That said, make this as long as you can.
3. A description of your rooms. What’s in the room? Is it ensuite? Has it any views? How many people can you accommodate per room and altogether?
4. Catering. Do you do it? If so, what do you do and for how much? If not, what cooking facilities are there?
5. Facilities. List everything that you offer from humble clock-radios through to heated swimming pools.
6. Seasons & Prices. Don’t use price ranges: be specific. Name the currency too as many guests will be international ones.
7. Booking. How do people make a booking with you? Go right through the process as this varies a lot from one property to another. Do you require a deposit? Is there a cleaning charge? Do you take credit cards (name them explicitly ie rather than saying “all major cards” say “American Express, Diners, Mastercard, Visa”). Do you take travel vouchers? How do people get money to you for deposits?
8. Directions. If you live onsite, include this otherwise it may be best to omit it and send the details out when you get a booking. List the airlines arriving in all the local airports and, if possible, where they fly from.
9. FAQ. Although this will duplicate to some extent what you’ve said in other areas many people look for this and you can get a lot of site visitors via it. Include things like the local voltage, type of plugs, credit card acceptance in shops, nearest ATM, etc.
10. Keywords. Keyphrases actually. You should have at least a dozen of these describing aspects of your property.
11. Local attractions. What is there to see and do locally? Name them ie say “close to Chateau Queribus” rather than “close to a castle”. Write a LOT on this as it’s a very easy way to pick up bookings.

If you run activity holidays then you’ll need a separate section for that and, usually, it’s best to produce a separate website for them as otherwise you’ll lose ordinary guests who are just looking for accommodation.

Within the website design itself the most important aspects of the above are:

1. the first 60 characters of the title as this is what people will see on searches and when they click on your site; 
2. the first 150 or so characters of the description as this is what they’ll see on searches;
3. the keywords, although not all search engines use these currently.

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? You’ll need to allow several days to fully complete all the above.

I’ll be talking about the photos next time and how you should go about getting the perfect set.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Incoming search terms:

• girl meditating
• pictures of meditating girl

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.

Popularity: 29% [?]