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E-MAILTELEPHONEMESSENGERE-MAILWhile every hotel should make an effort to portray its own unique brand and identity online, there are some simple, basic rules that all hotels should follow when designing their website which are tried and tested to bring optimum results. Read on for our top tips to guarantee your hotel’s website is beautiful in looks and effective in converting potential guests into real guests!
Your hotel’s website is the main point of contact for potential guests who are exploring accommodation options for their upcoming holidays. As the owner or manager of a hotel it is to your benefit to effectively present your rooms and services online. In today’s highly competitive travel industry, a badly designed website can seriously dent your bottom line!
Your hotel is unique right? Your website should be too! Stay far away from pre-built templates that make your website look like the website of thousands of other hotels throughout Greece (and the world)!
Choose a clear and simple design. Do not be afraid of “white space”, let the design of your website breathe and emphasise the most important aspects of your hotel without cluttering the page or confusing the visitor.
A well designed website gives every hotel the ability to inspire potential visitors with their first contact with your brand, don’t miss the opportunity to do it in style and stand out from the crowd! Need some visual inspiration? Have a look at some of our favourite hotel websites from 2020 that gave us inspiration for 2021!
Responsive design simply means that your website looks and behaves properly across all potential devices (PC, tablet, mobile, even TV!).
It is likely that at least 50% of the visitors to your website will be on mobile devices. It is no longer the 90’s, mobile phones are a fact of life and very shortly smart TVs will be too.
Be it a smartphone or a smart TV (or even an old school laptop), every device will show your website slightly differently and this needs to be taken into account during the design process. A responsive design strategy is crucial for every hotel website to ensure no matter what device the visitor is on, the hotel is presented beautifully and effectively!
We want to inspire the potential guests to our hotel and visually communicate the magical experience they will have with us!
A picture is worth a thousand words. But… a bad picture might say even more and can send potential guests running to your competitors in the blink of an eye!
Every hotel no matter how big or small, budget or boutique simply MUST invest in professional photographs that represent a true vision of the hotel and its property in the best possible light.
It has been proven in multiple studies that tourists want to be inspired by photographs and video rather than reading a long description or list of amenities. Give them what they want! Ensure to have good photographs of all aspects of your hotel. Rooms, reception, common areas, dining areas and of course the views!
Your website menu and navigation must be easy to understand and use. We have all visited websites where the menu is complicated, hidden or it simply doesn’t work properly and we have given up and gone somewhere else. Don’t let this happen on your website!
We want to easily allow visitors to find the information they want with a single click. At the same time we want to visually guide them to important information about our hotel that we want to present. We do this using a clear, effective navigation structure, it is a crucial part of any well designed website!
Further to a well thought out menu, we certainly do not want to ‘hide’ the next step we want visitors to take on our site. Using a clear ‘Call to Action’ is crucial. Obvious links to online reservation engines or invitations to communicate with the hotel for more information and bookings is an important part of an effective online hotel presence. Do not be afraid to emphasise what you want the visitor to do next!
Visitors to Greece come from all corners of the world. Hotels wanting to maximise their results should ensure they communicate with guests in their own language!
It is worth investing in professional translations in order to attract new clientele. English, French and German are now considered crucial for every hotel in Greece. If your region or island has tourists from other countries – add these languages to your website also. Let us not forget that having more than the basic English and Greek also opens up more possibilities for your hotel to appear in Google search results, allowing you to turbo charge your search engine marketing. So, take the opportunity to differentiate your hotel from the competition!
Once you have designed your beautiful new website and you have filled it with amazing photographs and detailed information, don’t stumble at the last step!
Research shows that for every one second a website delays to load, a substantial number of visitors simply close the page and go to another. Choose hosting which guarantees fast load times and do not forget to put an SSL certificate for encrypted transmission of all information. Your visitors will appreciate it!
Your new website is now live and your are admiring the work that has been done. Congratulations! Are you in the position to know if your website is doing the job you expect?
Google Analytics is a free service that gives you a complete picture of all the visitors to your website. It can tell you which country they are in, which pages they looked at and if they made an online booking or communicated with you.
We still see a surprising amount of websites that have gone live without Google Analytics. Don’t let yours be one of them!
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