Surely it’s easier and quicker to advertise on one of the vacation rental sites, or even to use one of the free listing services such as Google Base or Craig’s list? This is probably true, but what you want is results, and in this business that means visitors and bookings.

Here are nine reasons why your own site design will get you something a little better…

1. There’s too much competition so you need to do everything you can to improve your visibility on the internet. You simply can’t afford to miss out on your own site.

2. You can show your unique difference. Your property is uniquely different, right? You can use your site to highlight this, rather than fitting in with a bunch of other listings.

3. You’ll be more credible as a true online business with a brand, since you can choose your own logo, style and tagline.

4. Site tracking and analytics are way better. Actually they are probably non-existent on the free sites. Analytics allows you to make wise choices based on where your visitors come from, what they are looking for, and what leads them to a conversion.

5. Build as many pages as you want. Content is free (kind of) and there’s no restriction to a single page advert.

6. You get your own domain name. Good for branding (see above) plus you get to build your own Page Rank rather than contributing to someone else’s.

7. Choose your own conversion – whether it’s a contact form, advertising, newsletters, or a free brochure. You’re not restricted to a single form, and you’re free to build any combination of these to suit your website goals.

8. It’s stickier (I borrowed that term). In other words, you can layer more pages of useful information on your readers and take longer to convince them that you have a great place and offer unparalleled customer service. Compare this to a single page listing on a shared site where your competitors are just one click away…

9. Change your mind any time. Some listings sites only allow infrequent updates or may charge when you want to make a change. With your own site you can make adjustments and improvements any time.

One final thing. If you do decide to design your own vacation rental website, please don’t just buy a clone (unless you want to look like everyone else of course!)

It’s a great place for building focussed content and promoting it. Squidoo rates pretty high in Google and your pages can appear high up in search results.

It’s pretty easy to set up a lens and build some content, but making it successful and getting a good lens rank is a little bit harder. You can make some money if visitors click on the AdSense links which feature on your lens. This is what happened today!

I do know a Giant Squid and you can check out some of her lenses at EverythingMouse on Squidoo. A Giant Squid award is given by the folks at Squidoo to someone who creates top notch lenses (and lots of them). I’ll be following her lead as I develop more lenses and get started on promoting them.

1. Obsessively check your website stats

2. Book a round-the-world-tour

3. Go on your round-the-world-tour

4. Set up an AdWords campaign

5. Obsessively check your AdWords clicks and costs

6. Keep chasing links to your site

7. Watch an entire season of American Idol

What do you like to do while you’re waiting for Google? Leave a comment or you can Vote for your own ideas on my Google Alternatives Squidoo Lens

Is your website design too complicated? Do you have too much technology? Or, is it easy to understand what your site is about and is it easy to use?

With all this web technology around competing for your attention its easy to get distracted by what you can put on your website, rather than what you should put on your website. These days it’s not hard to get some flash animation or even a soundtrack. But do these actually help your website? Do they help to attract and retain visitors? Do they help add lots of useful content so you’ll be indexed by Google and the other search engines?

Don’t get me wrong, some of the best websites are able to combine great technology with compelling content. They are also successful. For your website though, don’t be too distracted by these until you’ve made sure you’ve developed something that’s really useful for your visitors. They may be initially impressed by your flash intro (maybe) but it may not keep them coming back for more.

The saga completes tomorrow!

What happens next? Tune in to Part 2 Tomorrow…

If you have a business with a guestbook (vacation rental, restaurant, tourist attraction) then this can be a great source for customer feedback. Other customers will read the guestbook and hopefully see all the positive comments from your satisfied previous customers.

If your guestbook is, well, a book, then the problem is that the only people who can read this are those who are already physically there. Those people are probably already your customers (or are likely to be very soon).

You can improve on this by putting a guestbook on your website. This makes those positive comments visible by anyone in the world who has an internet connection.

The problem with this is that your guestbook is probably written by you. Your customers might provide the original comments but you’ve probably entered them yourself. Did you make any changes? Maybe you left out some of the less positive ones. Even if you didn’t, there’s always a slight suspicion that this can take place.

If you have a blog then you can open it up and allow your readers to add comments to your posts. Why not create a post called “Guestbook” and invite your customers to start commenting. It’s a great way to get real feedback and your website visitors will appreciate your honesty and openness.

Does this make you feel slightly nervous? Are you worried that negative comments might appear in your guestbook?

Well, if your customers are complaining, why is this? Is there a problem with your product or your service? If so, you’d better get this fixed anyway. Stop reading this right now and go fix it!!

Assuming you don’t have a defective product, the best way here is to respond positively to the complaint. If your customer stayed in your vacation rental and there were no saucepans, tell them how you supplied some new ones immediately. If your restaurant customer’s food was served cold, apologize and say you reheated it immediately (joke). In general, customers understand that problems occur occasionally, and they will like you if they know that you correct problems for them.

So what do you think? Why don’t you throw away the old book and start connecting to your customers via the blogosphere? Positive comments only please!

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]]> http://www.infinite42.com/blog/throw-out-your-guestbook/feed 3 http://www.infinite42.com/blog/do-you-have-a-gourmet-website http://www.infinite42.com/blog/do-you-have-a-gourmet-website#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:05:59 +0000 dr.richard http://www.infinite42.com/?p=16 There are a lot of parallels between great website design and gourmet cooking.

I enjoy cooking and I’ve been inspired many times by Gordon Ramsay. He has a passion for great food and amazing customer service. If you want to have a great website then have a think about these:

1. Great cooking starts with the best ingredients. For a website, if you have high quality images, well-written content and relevant links to your site then this is a good start
2. Michelin 3-Star restaurants use the freshest ingredients. Make sure your content is kept up-to-date and don’t allow it to go stale
3. 3-Star restaurants also show great consistency. Is your website consistent with itself and with your email messages and with your advertising and with your interaction with customers?
4. Great dishes are simple and use a balance of tastes that complement each other. Does this remind you of your site, or is it a random mix of ideas and technologies?
5. Successful chefs show amazing passion which comes through in the food that they serve. Is your passion evident in your site?
6. Successful restaurants have a clear theme and delight their customers so they spread the word and keep coming back for more. Does your site do this?

It’s easy to get distracted by fancy technology and quick schemes to grab visitors. Ultimately though you’ve got to ask whether this is helping you to have a great website which customers like and keep coming back to.

You can get yourself a 3-star website too.

The page you spend most time developing, or

The page you spend the most time promoting, or

The page that loads when someone types www.yoursite.com, or

The page that people see first when they arrive at your site, or

The page with the highest PageRank, or

Your most popular page?

You might find that you get different answers for each of these. If so then you might not be making the most of your website. If a page is popular but doesn’t have much useful content, this can be improved. If visitors don’t arrive at the home page, you need to think about what they see first, and where they might go next. Make sure you don’t use up all of your best ideas and effort on the home page – other pages can be just as important.

• can you describe what your website is for, and
• is it really designed to do it?

Or, is the goal of your website confused by fancy graphics, collections of (ir)relevant information, multi-colored text and visitor counters? Does this sound familiar? Spend a few minutes browsing through a few websites and you might see what I mean.

If you know a bit about web technology it’s easy to get distracted by what you CAN build instead of focusing on the goal of the site, who your visitors are and how you are going to get them to the goal. Even if you work with a web designer, you need to think about this. They will probably have a nice portfolio of clever stuff that they’ve created for other clients. But can they help you to achieve your goal?

My advice is to write down the purpose of the site. You should be able to write down one (or two or three) goals. Everything that you put into the site should steer people toward those goals.

If not, it might be time to start using the delete key…