Chapter 23, creating an effective website. In this age of the internet and social media, having a website is essential to developing your property's brand. It is fine to promote your business in the flesh and with traditional media. But if you don't at least have a website, you're going to be seen as old fashioned and unapproachable. The look of your website will influence guests on the type of property you are. If your website looks dull, and boring, potential guests will think your property is dull and boring.
If your website is vibrant, and fun, guess we think your property is vibrant and fun. Your website should tell your story. tell your story proudly and have guests feel like they're part of that story. They'll help you build your brand into a big name. Whether you're starting from scratch, rebranding your property, or just doing a little tweaking, I'll go through in a step by step fashion. what and why items should be included on your website.
Your domain name, your domain name should be your website name. Now, this might seem obvious to some of you, but you'd be surprised how many hospitality properties I've seen that have a domain name that is not the same or does not reflect the name of the property. If at all possible, your domain, website and properties name should all be the same. This is extremely important for branding. When marketing your property, the first thing you want people to think of is your property's name. And almost 100% of the time when searching your property online, people will use that name.
Put or better long or short domain names. If you put 100 website developers in a room, half will say long, the other half will say short. One thing everyone does agree on is that the domain name should never be longer than 67 characters and I would include that spaces in that length. Shorter domain names are easier to remember and easier to type with less chance of a mistake. For example, Kings in.com. Longer domain names are quite often easier for human memory, especially if it flows.
For example, to storybook forest bed and breakfast.com. I would highly recommend staying away from hyphenated names. And if you're going to use the words da or my or plurals, always remember to promote your site with the full form of the name. If you found the perfect name, and wish to market to international customers, I would always try to get a.com domain extension. But if it's not available, it is quite alright to use dotnet. If your property is only hosting local guests within your country, then try to get your country's domain extension.
For example, canada.ca the United kingdom.uk australia.au choosing your web host. When choosing a web host, you have many options. Companies such as hostgator.com, or godaddy.com, are popular and full service. There are free web hosts out there, but most have advertising that could take away from the design of your site, or contain hidden text on its pages without your knowledge. This could lead to your website being penalized by the search engines through no fault of your own. Once you've settled on your domain name and web host, the next step is to design the website itself.
If you're hands on or have an employee that is comfortable with program coding, there are a couple of program options you could use to build your website. Option one, although it's a little expensive is Adobe Dreamweaver. Option two is an open source free program, you could try called composer and that's composer with HTML coding is one way to go. But my personal preference and the way that does work well is WordPress. WordPress is an online open source website creation tool written in PHP, an open source general purpose script language. It is probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system available today.
There are loads of things you can do on WordPress, and it has a multitude of themes you can choose from, from both free and for a fee. A theme I have seen many hospitality property owners use is Vantage and it's a free theme. WordPress is a program and with a little time, you can find your way around the themes and begin designing your website. designing your website. Before you hire a professional web designer or jump into WordPress with both feet. Put your thoughts to paper.
Sketch out the way you would like your website. To look, use the kiss formula, keep it simply simple. The simpler the structure of the site, the easier it is for your users to navigate. And you want your visitors to be able to navigate your site simply. The basic question you have to ask yourself when dealing with usability is Can your guests easily access the information they need? So they can do what you want them to do?
There are a few things involved in this question. One, your information is all the information your guests need to make an informed decision on your site. For example, information about your property, information about the rooms, images of your property and rooms, activities available on or around your property, menus, etc. to is your information easy to find is the information right in front of their eyes are easy to find link to that information. If your visitors have to work hard to find the information, they're not going to look. Three navigation buttons.
If you use navigation buttons or links to find pages, make sure they are consistent. It's not good for your guests to have to search each page to find navigation buttons. Some other tip designs, your page should look good, but not so full that is slow to load. Here are a few tips that you may want to consider. Don't overindulge in the text. You don't want your website to be a novel, but instead easy to read snippets of what you would like to share.
If you have more than one paragraph, separate them with whitespace colored pages are okay, but if the readability of your text is important to you, white or light backgrounds with a black or dark text works best. Your website has to be responsive or mobile friendly. Choosing fonts is a personal taste, but there are a couple of things you should keep in mind. Your font should be larger to improve screen resolution and on all size computer and device screens. A great resource for fonts is google.com forward slash fonts. Your color theme has to be consistent otherwise your site can be overwhelming to your visitors eyes.
I'm not the best when it comes to battable colors. So to get ideas I visit color.adobe.com slash create slash color hyphen we'll for our hospitality property, I believe good, clear images are imperative. Visitors want to see what they're getting. So include a gallery with photographs of your rooms, your common areas, and the on site surroundings. Make sure your images are honest. If not, you might be blasted with complaints, I believe would be well worth your expense to hire a professional photographer, but if this is not possible, you may Want to take the time to learn how to clean up your images and to size them appropriately for your website.
Videos are becoming imperative for marketing. A short welcoming video on your homepage is always great for grabbing visitors attention. We'll be spending more time on videos in the social media chapters. A great banner can impact on whether a visitor stays on your page. Again, you can hire a professional or go to fiverr.com. Or if you'd like to do it yourself.
A great site that I recommend is canva.com. It is a supersite for creating designs for websites, print, blog, graphics, flyers, posters, etc. A lot of it can be done for free for a very small charge. Never place outgoing links on your homepage. Inviting guests to leave your page too soon can be costly. Links should be embedded deep within your site.
You know the beautiful new websites, how are visitors going to find you? Your website has to be search engine friendly. Something you should do is to add text to your images and videos. This is just ordinary text using a couple of key words describing what the visitor is seeing. key words are the words and phrases that potential visitors type into the search box of the search engine, such as Google to find what websites match what they're looking for. If you're doing this yourself and using HTML, you can do this by describing each picture in the alt text for the image.
Search engines cannot see your pictures, but can read your alt text and now will be used to index your web page. This should be done for your videos describing what the video is about. Doing this makes your site more search engine friendly as well as making it usable for visually impaired visitors. Okay, your website is up. You have a great short welcoming video. Your images are Art Gallery worthy and you have visitors coming to your site.
Hopefully, they're going to book right away, or at least bookmark your page. If this is not the case, how can you encourage them to stay in touch, and continue to check out your page until they're ready to book, have a blog. I want to chat with an owner that suggested he should have his own blog. And he told me he had nothing to write about, and then spent the next two hours telling me stories of his property and the area. We all have stories to share. You don't have to be Ernest Hemingway or JK Rowling to write you just have to be yourself.
Your blog posts do not have to be long but should be published on a regular basis. A couple of other things to keep in mind. I mentioned before using keywords in your images is important. It is also important to use them in your blogs. As I previously stated keywords Are the words or phrases people use to find you or to find a service like yours, and they should be lightly salted throughout your posts. going overboard on the keywords is just like going overboard with the salt on your food.
Search engines will not find a tasty and ignore or penalize your site. Just be yourself. Write about your property, write about your region, and share offers that you have. Basically, you want to be enticing visitors to check you out. Use different keywords in different blog posts. Each time you use different keywords is another opportunity for your website to get discovered.
Think of questions you've been asked as a hospitality property owner and answer them in a blog post. There's a good chance that if somebody asked you a question, there are others out there wondering the same thing. your site may look beautiful, but your content carries today. Few people will return to your site. Just to admire your images, but they will be back to read what you have to say. Blogging on a regular basis can produce huge benefits.
Benefits for more visitors to your website, and your property. It's important to test your website. Search your website on Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer and Chrome. Make sure to suit your site on a tablet and a smartphone. testing your site and all these browsers is the only way you can be really sure that it works the way you want it to on your visitors devices. Some ways of promoting your website advertising and advertising you want to make sure to include your website address newsletter.
It's a great avenue to share information. And we'll be talking more about this in a future chapter. ebooks. ebooks are great. You take the time to write it once and it can be used for years to come. More about this one chapter 38 customer giveaways, Link structure and strategy.
Include a page on your website that lists surrounding attractions, transportation, information, tours and travel information. By including links to these sites, your resource page can help you Borel popularity. Create a searchable photo gallery. I know I've already mentioned this, but you're going to have to have a photo gallery, and in this description include your text and website address. Unless you include this information, these photo galleries are invisible to search engines. Wow.
There's quite a bit to take in this chapter, but it's not over yet. In the next chapter, we're going to take a look at email and guest list building