Great hotel marketing starts with hotel website design

Great Hotel Marketing Starts with Hotel Website Design

In this day and age, the most critical component of hotel marketing is great hotel website design.

hotel marketing, internet, website design, search engine optimization, hotel website design, hotel web site design

You may have the most wonderful hotel in the world, with gorgeous landscaping, comfortable rooms, and impeccable service, but if guests don't know about it, your occupancy rates will be a continual disappointment. In this day and age, the most critical component of hotel marketing is great hotel website design.

Why Hotel Website Design?

The numbers say it all. During 2007, almost a third of all hotel revenues will be generated by online channels. Moreover, over half of your target audience's decision-making is influenced by the Internet. Over a third of hotel guests choose their hotel based on online research, but book through another channel. The remainder researched their choices through an Internet portal, but then tried to book directly with the travel provider.

Without great hotel web site design, it's as if you printed 1,000 beautiful, four-color, ten-page brochures that stunningly captured the unique nature of your hotel at ten dollars apiece, and then locked them away in a cupboard. How effective would they be? The "look and feel" is vitally important in motivating visitors to explore your hotel product, and in guiding them to buy, but without the right technology, site structure, and navigation methods, you will only have marginal online revenues.

Hotel Search Engine Optimization

Even if you have a wonderful hotel web site design, if no one can find your website when they are searching online for that "luxury San Diego hotel," that "romantic B&B outside Paris," or that "adventure scuba holiday in the Maldives," it's as though you didn't have a website at all.

The way that potential guests will find your hotel web site is through search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is both an art and a science - and shouldn't be left to amateurs. Search engine optimization techniques will enable your hotel website to be returned high in the rankings of search engine results - a critical element of effective online hotel marketing.

Factors to Consider

When choosing a marketing company for your hotel website design, make sure that they understand and meet these goals:

* Generating qualified, quality visitor traffic
* Motivating visitors to delve deeper into your hotel website
* Converting visitors into online hotel revenues

Too often, hotel websites are developed in reverse, placing the emphasis on design rather than on generating website traffic. The key is to balance traffic generation effectiveness, the site's "look and feel," and conversion techniques to produce a hotel web site that looks great, gets plenty of traffic that converts into bookings.

Find a Hotel Website Design Company

Today, Internet design and marketing companies have specializations. In order to get the best return on investment, it's best to choose a website design company that specializes in hotel website design. Make sure that their approach adheres to the following guidelines - otherwise, keep shopping. The company should:

* Identify your visitors' expectations and intentions
* Work with you to clarify your own objectives
* Develop a hotel website revenue conversion strategy
* Determine site components that satisfy both design and search engine optimization goals
* Map our "click paths" that will lead to conversion

Your hotel website design and search engine optimization are the two keys to generating the kind of traffic that will keep your occupancy rates in the stratosphere!

 

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Great Handmade Gifts For Home

Most gift givers today prefer handmade gifts over the traditional ones because they feel that these exude sincerity and effort. For those who are planning to give gifts that can help one to beautify his or her home, there are so many handmade gift options for you to choose from.

Practical handmade gifts for home

Home dcor accessories are the most common handmade gifts that people can give for those who love decorating their homes. This is because these will help the receiver in decorating their homes the easier and more practical way. How? If they will be receiving gifts from people that they can use, they can finalize the list of home accessories that they will be needing. This list is very important for the receiver because it will be easier for him or her to organize things inside the home once they start decorating.

For gift-givers, the following are some of the major handmade home dcor and accessories that will help the receiver to have a house that is more organized and great looking:

- pillows. In living rooms and bedrooms, pillows indeed take a great part in the overall look of the house. This is because pillows soften empty corners of the bed as well of the chairs and sofas. The impact will be so much better if these are handmade. Today, there are so many types of pillows available in the market, you can choose from solid pillows, striped pillows, patterned pillows, floral pillows, floor pillows, rectangular pillows, and outdoor pillows depending on the personality and the needs of the receiver so you should consider these very well.

- handmade candlelight set. This is a considered as one of the most romantic home dcor accessories out there because they give soft and cozy feel in the house once use for their purpose. Today, handmade candlelight sets are the trend because they are more sophisticated and unique. If you choose this as a gift, you should consider coming up with matching candleholders, candles, and candle coasters.

- unique handmade vases. Categorized into tabletop, floor, bud, and accent, vases play a very big role in the beautification of one's home because each kind can highlight a certain part of the house and make it more appealing to people living inside the house and to visitors as well. Aside from holding flowers and other things inside the home, vases can also serve as decorative and artistic pieces. If you are giving this as a gift, consider the handmade ones from exotic places because these are indeed unique and very sentimental.

- wall dcors. Whether it is framed or custom art, metal, or native, wall decors play an important role in making the house livelier because they fill empty walls and make them more pleasant to the eye. There are so many handmade wall decors available in the market today. These can be more appealing since they tend to be unique when it comes to style, material, and texture.

- handmade native baskets. Although they might seem minor, basketsespecially the native and handmade onesare significant home dcor accessories because they serve as organizers. Since they hold almost everything and keep them in place, baskets of any kind should be present in any home.

- handmade area rugs. These play a major role in any home decoration because it serves as a main highlight in various parts of the house. Today, there are so many styles of area rugs that you can choose from depending on the need, taste, and preference of people.

If you are giving these a handmade gift, consider choosing handmade braided rugs, oriental tugs, Persian rugs, contemporary rugs, or character rugs depending on the taste of the receiver.

 

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Great Technical Writing: Tell Your Users What To Expect

OVERVIEW

In your User Documentation, you direct your Reader to perform tasks with your product. If you don't tell your Reader what to expect when performing those tasks, you will have a baffled Reader, resulting in dissatisfaction and expensive calls to technical support.

EXAMPLE: REVERSE OSMOSIS WATER FILTER

I bought and installed a Reverse Osmosis water filter. The instructions told me to fill, and then empty (the instructions foolishly used the term "dump," which ...

user documentation, new writer, writing, user manuals, how to write

OVERVIEW

In your User Documentation, you direct your Reader to perform tasks with your product. If you don't tell your Reader what to expect when performing those tasks, you will have a baffled Reader, resulting in dissatisfaction and expensive calls to technical support.

EXAMPLE: REVERSE OSMOSIS WATER FILTER

I bought and installed a Reverse Osmosis water filter. The instructions told me to fill, and then empty (the instructions foolishly used the term "dump," which would have caused the destruction of the system) the tank.

The filter had a capacity of about 100 gallons per day. Thus I expected the initial fill (4.5 gallon tank) to take less than one hour. After about an hour the tank was still filling. Worried, I called the technical support. I was told that it takes about two hours for the tank to fill.

One line in the User Documentation would have eliminated that call: "The tank initially takes 2 hours to fill." Not knowing what to expect I, and perhaps other Users, wasted the time and money to call the technical support line.

EXAMPLE: UPGRADING A ROUTER'S SOFTWARE

I had some problems with my Cable/DSL (Internet-Ethernet) router. The internal control panel made it easy to check for and download updates to the internal software. The system told me that it would take a few minutes to check for updates (good), but it did not tell me how long the update would take to perform once I downloaded the file.

Not telling the User what to expect in terms of time is a mistake. I started the update and after a few minutes of operation (was it working?) I canceled the process. I re-started it again, and decided to wait longer to see what happened. It took a few minutes longer, and successfully completed.

It would only take a simple phrase such as "the software update can take up to five minutes to complete" to reduce the User's anxiety.

PROGRESS INDICATORS (as displayed in a windowing environment) are often useless. Some go beyond 100%, others are logarithmic: they move quickly in the early processing and wait, seemingly at the end, for a long time while processing is completing. Consider making progress indicators relate to the time of operation, not number of files.

Some progress/activity indicators have nothing to do with the program they are associated with. I have used virus checkers that have abnormally terminated, yet the activity indicator kept on moving. Make sure that progress/activity indicators do reflect activity of the associated program.

FILE DOWNLOADS DO IT

Telling the User what to expect is not a new concept. If you have ever downloaded files, the download site will often tell how long the file will take to download, based upon your Internet connection.

EXAMPLE: YOUR PRODUCT'S INDICATORS

While most examples of "telling the User what to expect" deals with the time needed to complete an activity, others can be related to the indicators and performance of the product.

I have a small smart battery charger that has a red light for each of the battery positions. Unfortunately, the operation of these lights is impossible to understand, and there is no description of how they work.

Here's what happens. When you first insert the battery, the light illuminates. A short while later (the charging still has many hours to go), the light goes off. Sometime toward the end of the charging cycle the light may go on again.

This is clearly confusing to the User. The User's expectation is that when the light goes out, the charging is completed. This would result in a lot of User frustration, as Users would try to use "charged" batteries that were not charged. The developers of the battery charger should explain the operation of these displays.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Tell the Users what to expect as they use your product. Often this information is the amount of time it will take for an operation to complete. For other products, you may have to tell the User what the indicators mean.

Don't leave your document Readers confused or left to figure things out on their own. Doing so will reduce your Users' comfort with your product, and increase your technical support costs.

 

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Here you're going to learn several ways to save money every month by lowering your monthly bills.

 There are lots of ways to save money, no matter how much of it you have - or don't have!

 Having struggled for many years paying my own bills, I learned many ways to save money. From simple things like food, gas, and clothing, to bigger expenses, like insurance and your mortgage.

 All you need to know is where to look to find the savings.

 Several Ways To Save Money

 The first thing you need to do is eliminate ALL of your unnecessary expenses:

 - eating out on the weekends
 - buying lunch at work every day
 - magazine and newspaper subscriptions (especially those you can get online and at the local library)
 - cable TV (you'd be amazed at how many other ways you'll find to spend your time once you get rid of cable TV)
 - groceries (you can save lots of money with coupons and specials.)

 It's OK to reward yourself once in a while, but if you are really looking to get out of debt faster, you owe it to yourself to save every single penny you can!

 To find other ways to reduce your expenses, take a close look at your checkbook and credit card statements. You should also call your credit card companies to see if they will lower your interest rates, even if it is only for a short time.

 You'll be amazed at how many ways you can save money, especially once you start looking carefully at how you spend your money every month.

 Shop Around For The Lowest Prices

 For those expenses you can't eliminate, it's time to start shopping around for the best prices.

 Once I realized you can shop around for just about ANYTHING you spend money on every month, I learned how to save myself SEVERAL HUNDRED DOLLARS each and every month!

 In fact, by shopping around I ended up saving myself more than $750 a year on car insurance alone!

 The same is true of many of your monthly expenses - like long distance telephone service, internet service, all types of insurance, mortgages, and in some places even your utility bills.

 It DOESN'T take any special skills. All it takes is a few clicks and you can save yourself a bunch of money in no time at all!

 So, if you'd like to save yourself lots of money every month - and who doesn't - start shopping around and looking for ways to lower your monthly bills right away!