Internet presence

People say "if you are not on the net you do not exist". I happen to think that nowadays this is true. Everyone is surfing and whenever we need any kind of information our first instinct is to search on the Internet. So having a pleasing web site is an important thing for every business and especially a hospitality business, when so much booking is done online.

So your web presence have at least 3 key components to it.

a. Developing a web-site

b. Adding a booking engine.

c. Advertising on the Internet.

Each one of this components is, in my opinion, crucial. All are also costly so you need to give it some thought.

Developing a web-site. When we bought the motel it had a web-site. The web-site was and still is hosted by a professional company. However pretty early we realized that we need more control over it. We need to be able to add things or take them away and make it live. So this winter we purchased a software and design the web-site from the start. It is now completely "ours". We gave it a different look, add information that was not there but most of all we can now, with ease, change it every time that we want and it takes minutes.

I can already see the change when I look at our tracking information. Yes, we also are paying to belong to a tracking system that tells us how many people visit our site and where they are coming from. The main change is that people seem to stay more in the site, visit more pages and respond better to new information like specials. Again, money invested is showing results even if indirectly. Designing a web-site is not difficult if you have a software that is user friendly. Deciding how to design, what kind of look to give your web-site, that is challenging. We were lucky to have the original site that we liked and we kept parts of it. Things like color scheme, graphics etc' require a lot of time and planning. The wording of course are not less challenging. What to say and how much. I believe that a picture is worth a thousand words... so whenever I can, I will use more pictures and less words. We kept few rules all through the site.

1. Like I said less words more pictures/ graphics.

2. A constant color and style all through the site.

3. A navigation bar that lets you navigate with ease between the pages.

4. 90% of the information that is important to us is on the first page.

5. We have a side navigation bar that shows on each page and lets you go to the booking engine.

Again the main assumption that we kept in mind is that people do not want to spend a lot of time reading and they are generally looking to get the info as fast as possible. So they need to see the most important things within the first few seconds otherwise they will get bored and leave.