Website Needed For New Business

[Canick]

I'm am looking for someone to create a website for a new business here in BA.

In a few months we will be launching THE HAIG- a boutique building for long and short term stays-with a focus on Expats/tourists that want a hotel alternative. it will be expat run, and hopefully will combine a safe affordable place to stay, with a social element and community.

I'm looking for someone who has experience creating a reservation based website, that can also design and help me add elements of social media etc.

if you are interested, please PM me and i'll send you my email.

thanks so much,

nick

 

[thomsono1912]

You could probably do this yourself.

I did it recently with no experience using weebly because they have paid and free options, but there is a bunch of different sites that do the same thing.

There is a learning curve but it is relatively small and you will have complete control over your site. Weebly also has a bunch of good support to help overcome issues or answer questions. Not that I encountered any thus far.

People sometimes think this type of thing is constrained because you are stuck within their system, when i've had an issue i've always been able to google instructions and go into the code to make specific adjustments to the layout of my site.

It's easy to set up a contact form system, place items for sale, include a blog, slideshows, and your content. I don't know about reservations but I would use excel and take phone, contact form and email requests.

Then if your serious about it you can buy a domain from any where and get rid of the weebly from your URL (it appears like www.thehaig.weebly.com until you buy a domain to get www.thehaig.com)

Best of luck with the venture.

 

[Dublin2BuenosAires]

Hey Nick,

I can't build the system for you, but I would like to offer you some advice.

1. Rather than pay someone to build something for you, with potentially mixed results and limited support in place after it goes live (in 2 years time, if the system breaks, will you have someone who knows the system to support it for you?) I would recommend looking at a package or a service. Have a look on google for hotel reservation hosted software or services. I believe there are some which offer back office functions for credit cards. Remember when assessing your initial cost think about how scaleable either option is (in terms of adding and removing payment options and interaction with new social media and if course on going support costs).

2. Get a good web designer in after you have selected your package, let that be your focus once you have the functionality in place, make sure the English and Spanish is perfect and the presentation targets your market

3. Ideally your web designer should be able to help you with SEO (search engine optimization) and should be able to show you how to create and administer twitter and facebook pages. Helpful if they could give you a steer around how to get the most out of tripadvisor and sites like these.

Do you have anyone in your staff (however small that might be!) to dedicate a reasonable amount of time to this? Since you are marketing to expats you need to have a really good plan to reach out across the internet and a really strong presence.

Good luck !

 

[Dublin2BuenosAires]

I would really recommend (ps..I am not selling anything here!) having a professional looking reservations system. I personally would be wary of making a reservation across anything that looked a bit suspect. Excel and email would strike fear into my heart!

ps..i forgot to mention, i use booking.com a lot, assume you would need to link with the aggregate sites to get yourself on there, not sure how it works but i guess you would need some facility to accept payments and accept bookings, cancellations and updates from them and whichever others are available.

 

[Borracho Britanico]

It sounds like quite a bit job. Apart from all the technical aspects mentioned above, the branding is also very important.

 

[nikad]

The best way to approach this is by checking out your competition. See who developed their websites - usually there is a mention down the very bottom of the site - and take it from there

 

[thomsono1912]

[background=rgb(252, 252, 252)]Excel and email would strike fear into my heart![/background]

Haha I booked a hotel (through agoda) in Colonia the other day and when I arrived they had my name written in a book, very old fashioned But yes i've heard a little about people pre paying for apartments or hotel rooms that don't exist, scary stuff!

I always use booking.com or agoda.com for booking hotels too. It shouldn't be too difficult to take reservations through them in addition to your own booking system. Ive always been curious about how they work, how much of a cut they take, if your payment goes through them and they pay the hotel, how they make contact with the hotel to confirm the reservation etc

Anyway, I still think it's a waste of time and cash paying somebody to make a website for a small business these days. Any problems you have can be solved via google, or forums etc especially whirlpool. Search engine optimisation is easy to do, just be thorough about what you want to be associated with you site and then submit your site to google. Twitter and Facebook links easily to your page too. Surely a computer savvy colleague will be able to take care of it

Trying it out is free so it can't hurt.

 

[Dublin2BuenosAires]

It's all easy if you have the time! Also, for me your not buying the ability to make a website, you're buying the ability to make a good website with branding which targets your demographic. Ease of execution shouldn't take your focus away from why you are doing what you are doing! Sure anyone can work a camera, but it's harder to take a photo which can represent what you want to represent.

Also, booking system = payment information and customer sensitive information. Really, outsource the hassle. The functionality is the thing you don't want to develop yourself, it's too easy to end with something which isn't scaleable and not flexible enough to support changes in your business model.

Anyway. I will be looking out for your hotel & website! Good luck with it. Ps...there is a guy on this forum who has a blog and a hotel he is launching, suggest you hunt him down and see if he can help. Sorry, his username escapes me.

 

[Canick]

thanks to all who replied and gave me good advice. I know it's something i could do on my own, but I'm looking for an experienced "pro" so it doesn't look like a first timer did it.

i guess i'm looking for someone who not only knows the logistics of creating a website and the whole tech side to it, but someone who can create an exciting design to make it slightly different than the rest.

perhaps instead of looking for someone to do it on here, I should be asking if anyone can make a good recommendation of a company or individual who would fit the bill?

thanks again for your thoughts
n

 

[Jaredberryman]

I currently have a digital marketing consulting company and have quite a bit of knowledge about this issue. Some suggestions:

- Have you considered wordpress for your site (the software you download, not the online blog)? Wordpress you say? Wordpress is probably the best medium for SEO and SEM. Google loves Wordpress. And, there are some amazing themes out there you can purchase for 50 to 200 dollars, some that are made for hotels. You can then learn a bit about wordpress and start customizing your theme. The advantage of wordpress is that once your site is finished (you do it yourself), you have the ability to edit it yourself immediately. Our clients have to make changes, and this often means going and asking the webmaster to do the changes all the time because the page is in html, and you don't know html. Also, a lot of web designers claim they know how to make SEO friendly sites, but they really don't. And you have to first decide what keywords you are going to be targeting, and then add the right meta tags, etc. The nice thing about wordpress is that you can download SEO plugins, and a plugin for just about anything. Also, you're going to get a web designer to design your website, make it in html. Make sure the site is NOT made with flash as google will penalize you. Don't make any links with flash either (but flash elements are fine). Try to put a massive, and I mean massive, amount of content on your site. Lots of text, photos, videos, etc.

- Remember your focus should not just be to have cool looking site. You can have the most awesome looking site ever, but if no one sees it, what good does that do you? Focus instead on researching what you need to do to design a site ready to be positioned in Google. Make sure your home page is killer. Fill it with a lot of content, especially a lot of text. Make your text of good quality. If you decide to do Adwords, and you have a high bounce rate (your home page is not good and people stay very little on your landing page), Google will lower your quality score and thus lower your Adwords position. Focus on your home page more than anything else on the site. Research a bit about what Google likes. For example, if someone has to click four times to send a contact form, Google will penalize you.

-If you are mainly going to market to customers here in Argentina, choose a .com.ar domain. If it is to people all over the world, choose a .com domain. You can register a .com.ar domain for free and get it done in a couple of weeks.

If you need a recommendation for a web designer, or have other questions, I can give you one that I know who has years of experience and did a great job with a site I requested a few years ago (send me a private message). He was quite reasonable. However, I am regretful I didn't make it with wordpress!!