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Bed & Breakfasts who need help


Bed & Breakfast website designs have to walk the fine line between what looks good and what shows up well in search engines. A talented designer can make a site that looks good and shows up well, but not all of them do. Unfortunately, the web is littered with sites that look great, but won't get found by a search engine. They were designed by professionals and amateurs alike. The main reason is they were not created by someone who kept your needs in mind throughout the whole design and development process. So what should I do?


If you are having a new site built, make sure your designer has navigation on every page and does not use frames.

If you have an existing site that has pages with no navigation links on them, have them put on as soon as possible.

As someone who's owened a B&B business for over 15 years, and has designed websites for over a decade, would know the basics of website design a little better. Most often when I see this mistake it is when the site was created by a friend or family member instead of an actual

web designer. It's a easy rookie mistake.


Represent your B&B in a way that will attract guests

Get your website noticed

Impressive design, means more reservations

Here's how we can help: Avoid all use of a splash(s) page of any kind on your bed and breakfast's website. If you currently have a splash page on your web site, have it removed now, and replace it with a real home page with real content that spiders can read and links they can follow. If you are considering hiring a designer or web promotion "specialist," examine some of the sites in their portfolio, do they have formal education in this field. If they used any splash pages, keep looking for someone else to promote your bed and breakfast. (You can choose to educate the person, but if they don't know this, what else don't they know?)


Former Innkeeper

As a former innkeeper of the Historic 1859 Woldert-Spence Manor I know that making a good first impression is important. First impressions are important, but not at the expense of having potential guests be unable to find you in a search engine. There are several problems with splash pages: Spiders can't read pictures. There is no text for spiders to read, so nothing makes it into the search engine. If there is nothing on the page, there is nothing to show up in a search. You can't search for something that is not there. From a user's perspective, splash pages annoy people. Potential guests on the internet don't like to wait. They do not want to wait to see a page that presents no information except an invitation to click again. A web page should never start out by annoying people. It's the same reason you don't answer your B & B telephone by saying "What do you want?!?" In the case of the Flash splash page, a spider can not follow the link, so the spider can not go any farther to read the content that is deeper inside your site. Essentially the spider comes up against a locked door.


Popup Menus

Where too many B&B web sites run into problems is in the use fancier drop-down or pop-up menus for the links to other pages within their web site. They look great, but the majority of pull-down menus are created in ways that spiders can't follow. They are essentially a locked door that keeps spiders out. This can be devastating to your website traffic as many times the inner pages of a site have better content to show up in a search. However, if the spiders can't get in, they never see it, so the search engine doesn't know about it.


Bad Titles

Bad titles for your web pages are a doubly bad mistake. They effect how well you rank in search engines and effect how many people actually choose to click on your site when it appears in the search. Page titles influence the technology of the search and the mind of the searcher. It's quite likely you don't even notice the page title on your web pages, but you've seen hundreds of page titles if you've done any web searching.


Annoy Guests

Number one rule of website design for B&B's, don't annoy potential guests. From watching website tracking statistics I know that the majority of searches done for Bed and Breakfasts are done Monday through Wednesday and usually takes place between 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M., and 8:00 P.M. and 11:00 P.M. This means a very large majority of potential guests are searching for a B&B when they are in the office and should be working. So imagine a potential guest is sitting in their cubicle using the computer and they are supposed to be working, and as far as everyone around them knows, they are working. Then this music or sound effect comes blaring out of their computer and immediately tells everyone in the office, that they are messing around instead of working. Their first instinct is to click the back button or close the browser to make the telltale noise stop. This means many potential guests leave your website before they even see it. And the likelihood is that they will not return to it to see if they missed something.


Website Design Expense

When it comes to saving money on web site design, there is a lot that can be done to help reduce the costs. Keep in mind, what you are paying for is the designer's time, that's why they usually bill by the hour. If there are simple tasks that you can do, it means the designer doesn't have to do them, so his time on the job is less and he should be willing to pass that savings on to you. However, you need to work this out in advance. Here are some suggestions of how you can save money on your design.


Write Descriptons

Paying your designer his hourly rate to be a typist, is where a lot of money gets wasted. Do your best to write the descriptions you want used on your website ahead of time. They may need to be fine tuned by a marketing person or search engine optimizer, but at least you are giving them something to start with. Write them in a word processor or an email file so they can quickly copy and paste them into your site where they are needed. Don't give them to the designer on a handwritten piece of paper, or you will have yourself one very expensive typist.


Digital Photos

If the images you want used are in digital format they will be easier for your designer to use. Easier, means faster, faster means cheaper. If you give them paper photos, they will have to scan them and that takes time. However, don't cut corners and give them lousy looking photos because that is all you have that is digital. If better images are available on paper, then use them. Photo quality is important whether you are using digital images or paper based ones.

Don't send your web designer photos that you don't actually want to be used. If you have 50 photos and you think 12 of them are really bad, don't waste your designers' time (and your money) by sending them bad photos. Send them only photos that pass your standards. Quite likely (if the webmaster is any good) they will have an even more critical eye and have to narrow your selections down a little bit more, but at least they won't have to contemplate using a photo you don't like. Photo processing takes time to optimize photos (resizing, cropping, adjusting color, compressing image, airbrushing out items...) and what you don't want to risk creating is a situation where your designer spends an hour optimizing a photo and placing it on the website only to have you say "can you use a different photo, I don't like that one". That was time and money just wasted. Also, before you send your photos, spend a bit of time naming the files in a meaningful way. If a designer receives 40 photos of your bedrooms and bathrooms and they are all named "photo12.jpg" or other similarly meaningless names, the designer then has to spend time trying to decipher which photo is which bedroom and which bathroom goes with which room. Name them based on which room they are (examples: bedroom1-dresser.jpg, bedroom1-bed.jpg, bedroom1-bathtub.jpg, bedroom2-dresser.jpg...)

Remember the Basics

Your site will need "good" photos, descriptons & amenites, on-line reservation & availability link(s), prices, maps & directions. Focus on a good title for your website, have more links, possible cooking recipes, and list of any specials you might offer. Good luck!

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