The Microsoft Demographic Prediction Tool predicts the age and gender of your website or of a specific keyword phrase. Its insights into your audience could help you target your website more effectively. Just enter your website (and press URL button) and press Go.
Blizzardinternet.com is mostly male and in the 25-50 range. No surprises:
A Content Management System (CMS) is the platform on which a modern hotel’s website is typically built. Just a few years ago, programs like Dreamweaver, Contribute, FrontPage and Adobe GoLive were more commonly used tools to update a website. Now, a whole new generation of content management systems allows multiple individuals to share in the care and feeding of a website: designers, programmers, administrators, clients, SEO specialists and bloggers.
Choosing a new CMS is a big decision – a CMS that is a good fit can put you in hotel heaven or a bad fit into hotel hell. Here are Blizzard Internet’s top 9 tips to consider when choosing a new Content Management system for a hotel or resort.
ClickTale is a totally unique web analytics program because it actually videos your website visitors as they interact with your website. Careful, these movies can be addictive and entertaining! ClickTale also produces usable visitor analytics data related to where people look on your webpages and what links they click on.
Use ClickTale to make post-click marketing decisions … which is when you study your user behavior and change your website to increase conversions. The “eye tracking” (or clicking and scrolling) research it provides in the form of heatmaps is very insightful.
ClickTale has a free version that will let you try it out. We recommend the $99 per month version that should do everything you want, and more!
Blizzard is an affiliate of ClickTale, we signed up after seeing just how exciting a piece of software it is. Try CrazyEgg too for nice click heatmapping.
Blizzard recently designed a new website for Chula Vista Resort. Here is a screenshot:
The website features a WordPress content management system and:
OK, I admit it. I am color challenged. I know great color when I see it, but am not confident in my own abilities to pick colors. Recently I have been using online color tools to find new and better color schemes.
Kuler by Adobe is a handy tool that lets you choose different colors to base your palettes on:
to create color palettes like these:
Another similar program that I like even better is Color Scheme Designer. It has a slick color selector and shows off the colors intuitively:
You can take your palette and see what it would look like on a website too:
Find our other favorite tools in our Toolbox.
“Mind the gap” is a warning to train passengers to remind them of the sometimes significant gap between the train door and the station platform. Just as this term is used in train stations, it’s important to ‘Mind the gap’ with your website. When redesigning your website there are things you should not overlook!
What gaps does your site have that a redesign will fill? The following is a list of points to consider when redesigning your website.
Budget
Is a complete redesign within your budget? Your budget may determine the extent of your redesign. Do you need a new look, more traffic, higher ranking by search engines, a blog, a tracker, more pages, better photos, a reservation engine, hosting and maintenance? All of these, and more, should be considered when redesigning your website to help fill the gaps.
Simplify your navigation.
A simple navigation is like giving really good directions that will take a visitor from point A to point B. If your visitor can get around your site quickly and easily you have given them great directions and they will repay you by staying at your site for a longer amount of time which is what you want. Simplify and clearly define the meaning of each title in your navigation.
Site Map
A site map is a representation of the architecture of your website. The site map helps visitors and search engines find pages on your site.
Contact Information
Tell the visitor who you are, where you are and how you can be reached. It’s only polite.
Call to Action
Your phone number or email may be a call to action. Reserve or book now button. Join our newsletter. Seasonal specials available. All of these require the viewer to take action. Get the viewer involved.
Email Marketing
Email Newsletters can create a bond between your Hotel, Inn or Resort and your reader. Promote news and specials that are useful and convenient to the reader. Most newsletters are quickly scanned. Keep it brief and give them an option to unsubcribe if they choose.
Blog
If you have a blog. Keep it going. Post weekly. Create a community of readers. Write about what is relevant and time sensitive. In the hospitality industry you can post specials or write about the daily happenings in and around your resort. WordPress is an open-source (free) blogging software that makes your blog easy to use and maintain.
Cosmetic
Does your website need a facelift? That first impression is a lasting one. Know your target market. Create an image that appeals to your target market and promotes credibility for your business. Choose fonts and colors for your website that are clean and friendly to the viewer. Professional photos always improve a website. Choose photos that showcase your Inn, Hotel or Resort. Keep the file size small for quick loading times. The text content of your site should be kept to a minimum but enough to convey a clear message. Viewers scan text for information rather than actually reading it. Check spelling and grammar. If you have any pages that are not working correctly, fix them a.s.a.p. Unify pages by consistently using the same format. Fonts can be easily formatted with CSS.
Online Presence
SEO experts can help your website get a better ranking by search engines. High ranking by search engines means more viewers can find your website faster. Meta tags and H1’s that are managed by experts will help your website get more hits or viewers, leading to more reservations.
Tracker
Tracking and analyzing your website traffic enables you to maximize the effectiveness of your online marketing. The tracker works by including a small amount of html code to each page of your website. The tracker records first time visitors, returning visitors, visitors that made a purchase among other statistics.
Reservation Engine
If you choose to have a reservation engine that takes the viewer to a new page, design that page to have the same look and feel as your site. Headers, fonts and colors should match your site. Here at Blizzard the team has developed BRE; Blizzard Reservation Engine. BRE is a product that allows your booking engine to be customized and SEO friendly.
Maintenance
The last gap you want to fill is maintenance. You have a beautifully designed site now and you want to keep it up to date and well maintained. Keep your photos and specials up to date with the seasons. Have a SEO expert examine your site every couple months to improve your online presence. Correct any spelling or grammar mistakes immediately, and anything else that is not working correctly. Take the time to care for your site and it will reward you with frequent visitors who will return often.
“mind the gap” image courtesy markhillary
How many pages does your website have? Five? 10? 40? The truth is, the more pages that you have, the more expensive and time consuming your website updates will get if your site isn’t properly setup for content management. For example, if you wish to change the phone number on your website which appears on the bottom of over 40 pages, your webmaster will have to open up 40 files and manually change out your phone number. This will cost you quite a bit for such a small change.
What is Content Management?
Content management is the process of separating website content with its design elements. To better grasp this concept, let’s dissect a typical webpage:
1. Header – This is typically where your logo and your navigation will appear.
2. Content – This is where your text and images will appear.
3. Footer – This is where your contact and copyright information typically appears.
To keep the website consistent, we are going to separate these three elements by making them separate files or putting them separately into a database. For this example, we are going to put them into separate files (header.inc, mycontent.inc, footer.inc). Now let’s put it all together with the help of server-side programming:
Within this page’s code, it calls to “include” header.inc, mycontent.inc and footer.inc. So now going back to our first example regarding the phone number change, let’s say that we have setup our 40 page website with content management in mind. Instead of your webmaster having to manually open up 40 files, they will only have to open up one file to make this change (footer.inc). Once saved and uploaded back onto the server, the change will appear throughout the entire site, which will save lots of time and money on website maintenance.
Planning Ahead For The Future.
A majority of the time pages may look inconsistent on sites not setup for content management. This in turn looks unprofessional to your site’s visitors and may not give them the confidence to make a purchase. If you get a different designer to add a new page, this can also add to the inconsistency and lead to a website maintenance nightmare.
With a content managed website, expanding your website gets easier down the road if you want to add new pages. A site setup with content management in mind allows all new pages to be consistent with the rest of the website. Not to mention that it saves a lot of time for your web designer as well.
Now let’s say that your site is looking a bit outdated. No problem if your site is setup for content management. Since you have separated your content from your design, all you will have to modify are your design elements (header and footer). This also relieves the headache from your web designer since they won’t have to spend too much time retrieving the content from your old website.
Database-Driven Content Management Systems
In the above example, we separated the content and the design elements into files. Unfortunately, this can get kind of hard to manage, when you have numerous files on your server. Therefore, it is a good practice to put your content into a database so that it can be easily managed without the clutter. There are a lot of content management systems or CMSs out there that provide certain functionality. Among the vast selection, there are three that are widely supported, constantly improving and the best part is, they’re free!
Drupal
Drupal is a feature-rich open source content management system. Among its features, it provides search engine friendly urls, blogging functionality, discussion forum support and tracking and statistics reports. This CMS is not platform dependent, so you can install it on just about any server operating system. It is also database independent, meaning that you can install it on MySQL, PostgreSQL or any other SQL database.
Joomla
Joomla is another great open source content management system that is setup best for community-based functionality. It features search engine friendly urls, a simple installer, document management and a wide range of community support. Out of the box, Joomla is not setup for blogging, but that feature can be added with their extensive extension directory full of great add-ons.
WordPress
Wordpress is another open source CMS built originally as a blogging platform, but evolved to be a great content management system. Out of the box, blogging functionality is setup by default and its interface makes it relatively easy to get started. It provides the ability to setup search engine friendly urls and provides a file structure that is easy on the developer. With a wide-range of supported plugins, this CMS can provide just about any type of functionality.
Content management should be an essential step when you design your website. When it comes to growth and page consistency, you will be ready. Not only is it a good practice, it will save you a lot of time and money down the road.
Source Links:
http://www.wordpress.org
http://www.joomla.org
http://www.drupal.org
