• Make a Good Presentation of their Accommodation, Central Motel is an attractive accommodation with a great location in Port Fairy. It was easy to make improvements to the old website simply using new images and layout.
• Improve Search Engine Results, keywords like Great Ocean Road and Port Fairy have been emphasized along with basic terms like accommodation and motel.
• A Flexible Website that can be easily Managed, we’ve used BurgundySky again to make this website as it consistently provides great results.  We’ve used Google Maps, embedded video hosted on YouTube and Online Booking to simplify sales.

At the same time we updated their website, we also looked at inbound links, additional sales channels and opportunities to improve online bookings.

Jill went to a Travel Show in Sydney and had the devil of a time with agents because none of them knew the geography of Victoria well enough to understand where she’s located. If I wasn’t in this business, I wouldn’t know either. Bear Gully Coastal Cottages are located between Walkerville and Cape Liptrap. They are beach front on the Waratah Bay looking across the water to Wilsons Promontory. The Region is known as Gippsland.

In fact, Wilsons Promontory is an amazing National Park on a peninsula that is Australia’s Southern Most Point (not including Tasmania or other islands). It is about 2 1/2 hours by car from Melbourne. It is one of those Australian Destinations that is spectacular, amazingly beautiful, pristine nature, etc, etc. But, few people know about it.

Finding one of these great places can make for a very rewarding holiday. Figuring out how to do the marketing to get found is a nightmare. Jill has done all the right things: featured in travel shows like Getaways, spreads in newspapers and travel magazines and she’s won Victorian Tourism Awards for excellence.

So, our mission is to build a website and Internet Marketing process that will attract people to this little known destination and make them aware of Bear Gully and all that it has to offer. That will include a new website, linking and marketing strategies and a Pay-per-Click campaign with a small budget.

Strahan is located on Macquarie Harbour, which turned out to be 6 times bigger than Sydney Harbor.  The area is World Heritage Listed with amazing cruises on the Gordon River, Old Railway lines with Steam Engines, wild stretches of beach, and islands with wild tales from the convict days when they were building great ships from the Huon Pine.  Strahan looks like a very cool place to go.

The website follows a pattern that we’ve found to work well.  One item we added for this was an embedded like to a Live Webcam Overlooking Strahan.  That seems to have worked well.  The camera is a project funded by the local tourism organization and it gives the website visitor a great feeling for being in Strahan.

This website is built using BurgundySky.  It will give the owners a website they can self-manage as their motel changes. The property is very new and has been winning a lot of awards for being Environmentally Friendly.  They also have an interest in promoting Tours and Activities in the area, so they may be adding new pages to help their neighbor businesses.

One of the challenges with this website was finding the right keywords: is it a Motel, or Holiday Units, or Self-contained Apartments, or Self catering Cottages, New Affordable Accommodation in Strahan Tasmania – well I guess it is all of the above. Hopefully, people looking for a great place to stay will find the website.

The Zero Inn is a Comfort Inn and they want to build up their direct branding so that guests can book direct. We’ve found the same need for many chain motels. Both Best Western and Comfort Inn have good website marketing, but they tend to drag all guests in through their corporate systems which can delay cashflow as payments go through the group. Costs can also be higher for bookings processed by the Groups.

Previously, Zero Inn had no website at all. After the website was turned live, we updated their Local Business Centre in Google and found generic searches like motel in Nhill displayed them immediately at the top of results based on maps…. Got to love that!

It will be interesting to see how the website goes. They have already received bookings. Accommodation in Nhill Victoria is not the most competitive term.

1. BurgundySky – I use this for simple websites. There is no set up or installation because the CMS is integrated into the hosting. Just create an account and everything is installed. You also don’t have to worry about version upgrades, back up, any tech stuff on the server side.
2. Joomla- I’ve used Joomla to build the Golden Chain Motels Group website. This is a powerful open source CMS that has a huge community of people developing free and paid extensions that give the base package more features. The Golden Chain has over 330 Member Motels across Australia – so this is a big website with hundreds of pages.
3. WordPress- I’m using WordPress on this blog. So far, I like it, but I also find there are so many options that it gets confusing.  Like Blogger from Google, you have the option to build a free website/blog with free hosting by WordPress, which is great because it’s free, but also limited so that you’ll want to upgrade if you get serious. Like Joomla, there are some set up issues when you set up a WordPress website, but some hosts specialize in WordPress Hosting and they’ll do installation for you. I used WordPressHosting.com.au and they were fantastically helpful. I’m also based in Australia – so I like to use an Aussie Host because it helps with defining my locality.

So, it often comes down to Ease of Use vs Lots of Features.  I guess this is true for almost anything. The more stuff something can do, the harder it is to learn and maintain. If you’re not good at setting up servers and hosting accounts, try to find a hosting service that will help.  Yes, you often hear people bragging about how cheap their hosting, but it comes at a cost usually tied to your ability. For a few bucks more you’ll get service that is worth the small extra cost.

Here’s my review:

BurgundySky

Again, the easiest option is BurgundySky (IMHO). It has features, but they are limited. For an accommodation website I think you get all you’ll need. There are unlimited pages, image galleries, Google Maps, Contact Forms that block spam, in built stats packages as well as easy set up of Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, and full mail capability. There are a lot of templates and most can be customized with your own images and colours to that they look professional and uniquely your own. They’ve proven to be search engine friendly so that within a few days after going live you’ll often find them ranking highly – assuming you’ve written good keywords rich text and page titles.

If you’re wanting to take online bookings, you’ll probably use a service like Web Reservations or one of the others. These specialist systems use booking links that take guests from your website to another website where they can make safe and secure bookings with advance payments. That makes your life easier because they manage security and they provide tools to manage room allocations. Adding secure pages to websites cost extra and requires some attention to how your server is managed. Outsourcing that headache to someone else is a nice feeling.

Joomla

I’ve also had great luck with Joomla. When we made the Golden Chain website it required a complex structure to navigate and present the features of each Member Property. We needed to be able to organize all these businesses so that you could easily find what you need by location, topic, maps and basic searches. We wanted Member pages to have a consistent layout where contact details, image galleries, booking links, videos, etc.  We also wanted to be able to make changes as the site evolves, which means we can change a stylesheet to move something like a Toll Free number to the top, and then all Member Pages on the website are changed.  Believe me, when you have over 300 pages; thse global change features are very welcome.

Basic Joomla could not do what we needed. We hired Andrew Eddie and used his JXtended add-ons to enable the features we use to add Member pages and keep them in interlinked categories. It has been very good. We’ve used Joomla and JXtended for 2 years and they have been great. Both are free open source tools, but you’ll find that nothing is really free. Where you don’t have to pay for the software, you will most likely have to pay someone to set it up for you. On the bright side, most people in the Open Source community seem to have a good attitude toward helping people and making the community grow successfully. Working with Andrew was really easy.

WordPress

So far, so good. I’ve only been using WordPress for a few days.  As you can see, I’ve been able to make a lot of posts and somehow you’ve found them. Search Engines and getting found are always the main point of any website.  Wordpress is opening a new world for me with a different style of connectivity. Where our normal websites rely on Google, we are finding RSS, TechnoRati and other mediums with Pings and Trackbacks important.  Yes, basic SEO with good page titles and content and basic efforts to build inbound links remain a constant. 

Is it easy?  Well, I have mixed opinions there. Finding and installing the right plug ins is not easy.  Getting Templates is sort of easy, but they often need to be modified, which is not ‘easy’. I would say that unless you have a fair amount of skill plus a good deal of time, you would probably want to hire someone to set up WordPress.

And the Winning CMS is…..

For me, BurgundySky is the easiest website for accommodation providers. Try the free BurgundySky trial and save yourself the hassles.

An iframe is a way to have a web-page inside a web page.  There are a couple of page types that open without the normal navigation features: Image Gallery, Map and Booking System. In their natural form, they open like a pop up.  That works, but you lack some advantages such as being able to use Page Titles, add content useful for keywords and they just look better opened in the regular website.

• Image Gallery – Local Images
• Map of Port Stephens
• Availability and Rates

In order to create content that is linked in an iframe, you would first create the original page and save it to a ‘hidden catagory’.  Then, create the page which will have the inserted iframe.  You can write whatever is needed above or below the iframe. To insert the iframe, you must switch to code view and insert the following:

<div><iframe align=”center” src=”http://botababandb.com.au/gallery.php?galleryid=445″ width=”99%” scrolling=”no” height=”600″></iframe>
</div>

Change the src= to your targeted content and select the appropriate height.  Save your page and see if it worked.  If not, try resizing the original content or changing the size of the iframe.

By setting the width to equal a percentage rather than a fixed number, the frame will automatically size to fit the available space.  As you change templates, your space changes as well – sometimes breaking the display of the frame.  The height must always be a fixed number.

I personally don’t like iframes with content that doesn’t fit the space.  In the code example above, I added scrolling=”no”.  If the content was over-sized for the window, then scrolling = yes would allow the viewer to slide a bar from side to side or up and down to view all content.

Pages change with the template.  So, if you change the theme of a website be sure to check all pages to see if they still look good.