I’ve just spent the best part of an hour wanderlusting at all the gorgeous websites in this roundup of inspirational travel website designs.  They are beautiful websites.  Some are more effective and usable than others, but all definitely easy on the eyes.

I couldn’t help but notice the comment “Frederica” left:

I noted that these hotels and resorts are almost all luxury hotel: it’s far more simple to design a beautiful website if you have awesome pictures!

Hmm.  I don’t think that is true.  Yes, pictures say a thousand words, as the cliché goes,  and if you don’t have any photos on your website, people will wonder what you are hiding.  Yes, they need to be professional photos – not expensive, but not lousy off-the-cuff shots with a blurry cameraphone.  (Side point:  It might just be me, but I would rather see photos that look like a tourist took them – instead of the overly glossy marketing photos.  Perhaps it is just me.  Personal preference.)

But no way do you need to have a million dollar facility to have great photos.  Here are some photos I just found from visitors to budget hotel properties – these visitors have shared these photos to their friends on Flickr.

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One of the biggest battles of building a great travel website is getting your new visitors comfortable enough to take their first step.  I don’t know of any buying lifecycle that’s completed in only one step, so no doubt you’ll require a few pages to educate your readers on your offering and then entice them to actually take you up on it.

First, establish the context.  We’ve talked about this before – it should only take a matter of seconds – two or three maximum – for a user to know where they are.  The easiest way to do this is to have a clear, simple strapline under you header or logo image.  ”London’s best value for money B&B on the sunny Thames River.”  ”Award-Winning Historic Walking Tours of New Orelans.”  ”Affordable Travel Packages and Services for Aruba and Venezuela.”   Those are so clear, you don’t even have to go to the website to know what they’re doing.

Second, tell them what to do.  When someone arrives at your site, what do you want them to do?  Craft the ideal journey, then send them on it.  For example, you might introduce yourself, then say, listen to what other customers have said.  Or just show them the packages and options.  What’s your unique value?  If it’s YOU, then go to the About You page.  If it’s how your customers rave about you, send them there.  If you’re about budget and value, send them to the discounts page.  But tell them – with text, images, and a link. Read the rest of this article »

There are a lot of conversations going on these days about tracking online ROI.  It’s a difficult thing to measure, for sure, but small business owners seem to get hung up on one important must-do point: monitoring the performance of their website.  Flickr profiles, Twitter links, and Facebook status updates always end up pointing to sales pages and reservations tools on your website.  It’s a no brainer then that statistics on how your website is performing have a direct correlation to return on investment and your overall online revenue.

But there is a problem.  Specifically, two.

The Two Types of Problems

I see almost every day one or two problems:

• The Website with No Analytics:  When I ask, I typically get the response: “We looked at analytics and it looked kind of complicated.  Plus we didn’t really understand the value.”  I believe faith can go a long way, but… If that’s you, keep reading.
• The Website with Analytics and No Action: This story starts out as “We installed analytics and then didn’t really understand the output.  We don’t really look at it.”  This is, by far, the most common scenario. If that’s you, keep reading.

In Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin, he states that 79% of businesses obsess about their analytics data, yet less than 3% actually do anything with that data.  Are you obsessing, or doing?

Analytics Is Simpler & More Important Than you Think

I think the problem is that small business owners tend to overcomplicate analytics – which is understandable.  A/B testing?  Pageviews, events, funnels?  Yikes.  Sounds scary?  Perhaps.  But the thing is that if you tie the reports and scary technical terms to business events and business effect, it ends up being pretty simple.

You can even have Google Analytics, a free tool that we and many small businesses like ourselves prefer, send you an email every week with your most important website figures.  It’s kind of like having your own assistant, free of charge!

Wouldn’t it be nice to know about:

• the content  on your website nobody likes
• the most popular words that people type into Google to find you
• the marketing campaigns that send you the most (or least) traffic
• the percentage of visitors that end up making a purchase, and at what points the most people “abandon” their transaction?

All sounds like good information to me – but you can only track this stuff if you have an analytics package installed and you use the data to implement changes.

If you have one, do you use it?  A member of our community, Trisha Miller, says:  “Information that you look at but don’t act on is no different than having no information at all.”     Enough said.

Our Solution

Given that analytics is an all-too-often question, we’ve added a new guide to our DIY library of resources to help folks take more advantage of the free online tools out there.  The latest guide, Understanding Success with Google Analytics, takes our traditional no non-sense approach and applies it to the scary world of analytics.

There are a few technical tasks, but at the end of the day, even the busiest and the most harried business owner can easily flip through these 50 pages of screenshots and helpful tips to make the most of a free Google Analytics account, a best-in-class analytics package provided by Google.

Download Your Copy of Our Guide Today!

Tired of running your online campaigns without the information you need?  Want to know how well your website is performing?  Then click here to download a copy of our guide immediately and start implementing the tips and tricks we’ve learned to make your website more successful.

Make analytics work for you – get the guide and get yourself sorted.

Initial image by kevindooley.

We talked recently about the Five Myths on What Makes a Great Website.  But at the end of the day, if there is only one principle you can stick to for making  your website suck less and sell more, it is this:
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Do you think you have a great website?  What makes a website great?  Well, lots of things make a great website, but some thing’s don’t.  Here are five myths about what makes a great website and what you really need instead.

A Great Website Has Lots of Great Graphics

Wrong.  A great website is about the message, about speaking directly to your ideal customer, and explaining the value of the service you provide and why it is different or better than the competition.  Lots of flashy graphics doesn’t help do that – in fact, it can hinder, as you’ll either confuse or lose the customer’s attention all together.  How many great television advertisements can you think of where you remember everything about the commercial except the brand that it was advertising?
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There’s an awful lot of frustration out there when it comes to websites, social media, and all-things-online.  Some of the most common complaints I’ve heard most recently:

• I don’t have the time.  I spend all day trying to run my business.  More stuff to do is the last thing I need.
• There are FAR too many choices on line for where to spend my time.  How am I supposed to know where to start?
• Using social media a huge time suck, often with little reward.

Sound familiar?

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Do you know what the most important part of your online strategy should be?  No, it’s not building traffic, but that’s important.  No, it’s not branding and looking good – but you’re close.

Content and messaging.  The key to a successful online presence.

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Do you think your website is telling your customers everything it should be? Think again. Here’s 10 things that should be on every small business website.   Read through the list then check your site.

And in no particular order….

1. Contact Details. All of them that you accept open queries to – email, phone, fax, contact forms, and your business address. Even if people don’t’ use them, contact details tells uneasy clients that you’re a real business and aren’t going to run away with their money. Read the rest of this article »