Effective web development is critical for any successful business strategy in the contemporary world—and that counts double in the hospitality industry. If you want potential customers to get connected with your business, you must establish a well-designed website.
With that said, if you don’t have web design experience coming in, creating a website can be challenging. We highly recommend hiring a firm or a freelancer to build one for you if you have the funds. A cheaper alternative is to build it using a user-friendly service like SquareSpace or Wix.
This guide will give you an overview of the different things that will be vital for you to keep in mind as you build your website.
Storytelling
The first thing to remember when designing your website is that effective hospitality web design tells a story. So what story will you be telling? Will you focus on the down-to-earth, homey nature of your hotel restaurant or your luxurious amenities? Will you be primarily playing up the benefits of the area in which your lodge is located or the lodge itself?
Any of these are viable strategies; you just need to ensure that you choose the one that fits best for your business. There can be no one-size-fits-all story.
Responsive Design
On the technical end of things, make sure you create your website with responsive design in mind. Responsive design is the art of making a website that works well on any screen size, from mobile phones to TV monitors.
Most website services currently offer responsive design features, but you will need to do some of the legwork there. As you’re designing your website, make sure to test it on your phone browser as well as your computer browser. Try out how it looks on multiple screen sizes to ensure that your website appeals to a maximum number of customers.
Content Creation
Even the greatest hospitality web design isn’t worth very much if you don’t have content to feature on your website. Content creation is a vital part of this process: the more people who visit your site for whatever reason, the more potential customers you will have.
Photography
Photography is one of the most important parts of your hospitality web content– your pictures will communicate to your potential customers what sort of business you run. Depending on the sort of website you design, these pictures may also provide a great deal of the content that your website viewers see at any given moment.
When choosing your pictures, keep in mind the story you’re trying to tell about your business. If you’re trying to sell your hotel as a homey, small-town eatery, you might want to focus on “cozy” pictures and pictures from the community. Whereas if you’re trying to sell it as an exotic destination, you’ll want to focus on the features of your location that make it stick out.
Because photography is so important, hiring a professional photographer to take the pictures you’ll be featuring on your website is advisable.
Blog
In a blog, your creativity is the limit for the sorts of content you can create. Anything that will bring clicks to your website works well in a blog. That can include a guide on local tourist attractions, reflections on what makes your hotel distinct, heartwarming stories, employees taking part in social media challenges, and much more.
Testimonials
Finally, you will want to make sure you include some customer testimonials somewhere on your website. To solicit these testimonials, you can easily rely on review aggregators like Yelp or Google.
If you want to acquire more personalized reviews, you can offer some sort of reward for customers who submit testimonials, such as a small coupon on their next stay or entering them for a gift card.
Promoting Your Website
Once you feel comfortable with the website you created, the next step is getting it out into the public eye. To do so, you need to take advantage of both social media and advertising services.
If you don’t yet have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, don’t hesitate to navigate to those websites and create them. Those can be vital sources of traffic for your website and business.
You can share the content you’ve created for your website more broadly on your social media accounts. Every blog post, testimonial, and picture you publish on your website can be converted into an effective social media post to drive traffic to it.