Building Your Holiday Property Website: A Beginners Guide

Bookster is designed to capture your bookings online, but it really needs a slick website to sit on.

Why Is It Important?

When setting up your holiday home(s), one of the obvious steps is to set up your own web site, but why is it important to get your own website and get it right?

Original Source

From our experience running our own and client directory sites, we have found that surfers are constantly looking to get to the original source.

You have probably done it yourself, browsing Expedia or Travelocity, you find a hotel that you like the look of and immediately try to find the hotel's own website by typing it into Google. many of your surfers will behave in exactly that way and you can greatly increase your chances of capturing them directly if you have a highly visible website.

Say Things In Your Own Way

This is your opportunity to represent your holiday home(s) in the way that you want to.

Styling and content can both be explicitly specified by you without any interference from 3rd party companies.

Track Interest

If you have your own web site you can track interest in your property knowing that there is no spin being put on it from a 3rd party web site. See what people are search for and where in the world they are searching from.

Some stats packages for tracking visitors to your holiday home web site:

Clicky Web Analytics (getclicky.com)
Google Analytics (google.com/analytics)
Stat Counter (statcounter.com)
Site Meter (sitemeter.com)
W3Counter (w3counter.com)

Building A Site From Scratch

If you are planning to build your own, unique website from scratch, you will need to think about following steps:

Purchase a domain name - e.g.:
- Go Daddy (godaddy.com)
- 123 Reg (123-reg.co.uk)
- Easily (easily.co.uk)
Basic Site Structure - before contacting a web developer, make a quick note of the pages your would like on your site - be as specific as you can. (e.g. homepage, availability calendar, gallery, weather etc.)
Web Developer - personal recommendations are important and remember that you are likely to need to build up an ongoing relationship with your web developer (or "Webmaster") as they are likely to be responsible for making changes to your site in future - e.g.
- Starfish Websites (starfishwebsites.com)
Graphics - if you are really serious about getting a slick site up there you may need to employ the services of a graphic artist.
Photography - for property web sites, having top quality images is extremely important, most potential guests will use this as the primary method for assessing your property. Ensure that you get top quality images taken of your holiday home(s) and you will be able to use them over and over again when promoting your property elsewhere.

Working From A Template

Let someone else do the hard work!

Instant Web Sites

The quickest way to getting a web site up and running is to use an online, instant template.

Sometimes it is quicker and easier to use tried and tested sites built for holiday homes - there are a few out there and it is certainly a more cost effective route.

Some instant holiday home website site providers:

Independent Owners (independentowners.com)
G-Force (villa-web-templates.co.uk)
Simplicity (simplicitywebsites.co.uk)
Holiday Site Builder (holidaysitebuilder.com)
Villa Web (villaweb.co.uk) [update 11th May 2010 : Villa Web may no longer be trading]

Content Management Systems

A Content Management System (CMS) will typically be installed and set up by your web developer and allow you to manage the news, blogs, static content etc. on the web site on your own, depending on how confident you are!

There are a number of CMSs in common usage and many themes (free or paid) that you can take advantage of to avoid commissioning a bespoke graphical design.

Examples of CMS sites for Holiday Homes in action:

Joomla
- The Edinburgh Address (theedinburghaddress.com)
- Cornwall Self Cater (cornwallselfcater.co.uk)
WordPress
- Peyrenegre (peyrenegre.net)
- Basse Copette (luxurynormandygite.com)

Promotion

There is a whole industry based around promoting your websites... lets leave that one for another day!

Comments

Add New

Villa and and Holiday Web Templates

G-Force (Villa Web Templates) (Monday 10th August 2009 - 06:34)

Thanks for the link to G-Force (Villa Web Templates) . I have now recommended your Booster service to all my holiday home customers... I hope they take a look and book !! Cheers

http://www.villa-web-templates.co.uk

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Thanks!

Robin Morris (Friday 28th August 2009 - 20:32)

Thanks for passing on our name, we hope that we can provide some of them with a good solution.

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Don't use Villaweb

John (Wednesday 28th April 2010 - 18:14)

I've been with Villaweb for the last two years, but recently their support email has stopped working, their site doesn't work, and now finally, having just paid renewal fees, my site has disappeared. Theyr'e a Polish company and I was told they went bust - anyhow, steer clear. I've now got to start all over again.

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Re: Don't use Villaweb

rmorris (SAdministrator) (Tuesday 11th May 2010 - 13:07)

Hi John, sorry to hear about your plight.

I will update the article to show that they may have gone bust.

If you have a number of properties we could provide a solution with integrated online booking.

See http://www.tribalogic.net/platform/property-age...

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