My good friend Bruce Henderson rang me today to share ideas on how to improve ranking for regional travel websites. Bruce runs a very successful website about Warrnambool on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road.
We could have discussed for hours the ways to optomize around how people mis-spell ‘Warnambol‘, but this time we were scratching our heads over how to plan new website for Robe Australia. Bruce has just started a new website called Robe Accommodation Guide. Here, you have to ask the classic question, is it better to extend the Warrnambol website to include Robe or to build 2 websites?
Physically, Robe is 6 hours drive from Warrnambool. It’s in another state and another travel region. It has a different type of visitor.
So, does it make sense to build a new website or build upon an existing website? The jury is still out. For now, Bruce has done both. It will be interesting to see what happens.
About Mark
Founder of
Web Reservation Systems, focused on helping businesses in the Australian Accommodation travel sector get more value from Internet Marketing.
Originally, we opened up in 2001 as a supplier of Front Office Software linked to Online Booking facilities. That allowed motels and hotels to add booking buttons to their websites as well as sell through Global Distribution Systems. You could say this was an early 'Channel Manager' because it allowed the property manager to simply control price and availability for a diverse array of wholesale and retails websites.
Next, we started building websites to profile our customers (
Australian Holiday Guide). That lead to building websites for customers as a favour. Now do about 80 websites a year using BurgundySky and Joomla.
For small businesses I recommend using BurgundySky as it is very easy to start and manage. Joomla is also great, but harder to install and maintain for a small business. For a large website, Joomla is great - here's what we did for
Golden Chain Motels, Australia largest accommodation provider with over 335 locations.
Our business is based in Byron Bay, NSW. Byron Bay is a great place to live and work. I have 2 kids (12 and 14) who are both born here and my wife,
Shobhan Oliver)is a successful artist.
