Self Catering Website Design | Increase Direct Bookings - Holiday Homes, Cottages & Apartments

There are many great services that accommodation owners can and should use, (many being completely free of charge), that will make a big difference to their marketing.

One of these is Mailchimp (or similar) - which is a free (up to 2000 contacts) email service. If you have a mailing list of past or potential guests, and you wish to grow that list then you should be using this service. Did you know that if you try and send out a bulk email (sending an email to a large group at once) that you are likely to get blacklisted by your internet provider if you sent it from your own email service? For one thing, your email is not likely to reach the recipients, and if you end up blacklisting your main email address it could impact any emails you send thereafter.

So using an email marketing service makes a lot of sense, particularly as email marketing still is one of the best and most effective form of marketing there is.

We help our customers build up their email marketing list, by adding a newsletter sign-up area to their website (normally in the footer area) which will make it really easy for site visitors to be able to add themselves.

Our new Mobile Action Bar also offers great functionality - on Mobile View there are 3 buttons on view at all times, providing the ability to Call, Book or Email - see it in action on this website: Visit Website

This Mobile Action Bar makes it really easy for mobile users to get in touch or book.

We also provide off-site functionality - one of these is providing a free-of-charge online guestpack for our guests.

Building trust...integrating a great way to display your best (and verified) reviews on your website is another great bit of functionality that we can assist with. Repuso is a 3rd party (paid-for service) that is highly recommended as it allows you to display your best reviews whilst clearly showing these reviews to be genuine.

This is a big one. It sounds like a dream doesn't it? For one system to grow your website, provide social content and improve your website's Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) all in one go?

Well, it's a dream that can become a reality for you!

When we realised how many owners drop off the radar over the high season months, we decided to provide them with a system that would allow owners to spend just 5 minutes a week to combat this problem.

We created a system that we liken to Instagram, but it's just for your own website.

It's photo-based, so no need to spend hours typing out a lengthy post, and the beauty of it is as follows:

People love seeing other people's photos - which is why Instagram is so popular. Displaying great photos as a photo blog on your site, along with a little caption provides interest for your site visitors and increases your site interaction. These photo posts can be of anything interesting local to the accommodation; eg photos taken during a lovely meal out, or of a walk, perhaps a lovely photo of wildlife or farm animals, eg sheep or lambs, or something nice in the property itself, perhaps new furnishings, or garden photos etc.

Saving You Time: Each photo post can get auto-posted to your Facebook and saves you from needing to add any social posts directly onto your account.

Improve your website SEO: Best of all, as each photo post essentially becomes a website page, over the course of a year you could easily have added 50 new website pages to your website. Google and other search engines love new content being added, so the more you post, the better for your website's SEO!

Having created so many accommodation websites, we know what makes a good website for both owners and for their site visitors.

You know what it's like yourself, if you visit a poorly constructed, or hard-to-navigate website, it is not only frustrating but makes you wonder if the service that the website is providing is also not quite up to scratch...

Our websites all provide or offer the following:

• Stylish, easy to navigate, professionally designed websites, each one created with the owner's niches and selling points displayed to their best advantage.
• Provide Call-To-Actions throughout, these are buttons, or areas throughout each website page, that encourage your site visitor to do something such as enquire, book or check availability.
• Provide all the functionality you need to get direct bookings. We recommend owners to include a booking system (not part of our website service) that we can integrate into your website, allowing your site visitors to book online easily - and if you don't currently use a booking system we can discuss which ones would work for you. If you don't want to use a booking system for whatever reason, we can include a free stylish calendar for each property, and an enquiry form.
• Ensure that your site has great on-site Search Engine Optimisation; we will make sure your best niches are included to enable your site to get found for these.
• Allow the ability to find out more about your website visitors. Adding analytics to your site will allow you to see the journey your website visitors take throughout your website.
• Our sites have one of the easiest editing systems ever seen! Never again will you feel "it's too much" to edit your website text and photos! Take a look here at just how easy it is: Click here
• Save you time and energy with our Photo Blog Posts functionality (like Instagram for your website)
• Mobile/Tablet design - so many websites are designed to look great on desktop/laptops but fail to impress on smartphones and tablets. We design our websites to be "Mobile First" - which means our websites not only work brilliant on mobiles and tablets, but look amazing too!
• "Join the club" - becoming one of our customers allows you to join our exclusive "club" - we allow all our customers to get a brand new website at anytime, at just 50% of the cost of a new site, which means you'll never need to spend a lot to keep your website fresh and lovely. In addition, we have a new Facebook group for our owners, as well as our Knowledge Base website where we answer any question posed by our owners (and it can be on anything online, not just about websites) that you want help with, such as social media marketing etc.