Thinking of getting a (tourism) website makeover?

 

The competitive wooing of online visitors has suddenly changed the need for an online presence from a necessity to an essential.

Three years ago, as the owner of a bed and breakfast, Whitman Wharf House Bed and Breakfast, at the edge of the world in Canso, Nova Scotia, I started business with the premise that I expected most of my business to come from online bookings.  

Despite being an online advocate for the tourism industry, even I have been astonished at how quickly it is evolving and also the increased competitiveness of tourism sites. The knock-on effect of constantly creating content for my own site is that I now have zero tolerance for poorly maintained sites, or sites that are difficult to navigate when I am the customer.

What am I looking for on a tourism website?

1. I am looking for websites that deliver not just the usual information on room, rates, etc. but are visually enticing and give a glimpse into what’s going on there, who’s doing what and what’s new.
2. I am definitely on the hunt for interesting photographs and this is what is sadly missing on a lot of websites. 
3. What I am not looking for is uniformity. I have checked out a number of websites lately that have clearly just come away from having an expensive makeover only to find that the same two Adirondack chairs are sitting there on the home page!
4. Authenticity is critical. My answer in creating an “authentic feel” to a tourism website is to take the photos myself rather than relying on a web designer’s selection from a stock photo file.
5. The other thing is that I want the photos to tell the story, convey the emotion and describe the experience. Even in the past year I have noticed a real shift in the way websites are becoming much more visually oriented with more photos and graphics and much less text.

How do I create photos for my website?

 

1. I use a free download, “IrfanView” from www.irfanview.com for simple cropping, colour and light adjustments, and for resizing images.
2. I find that photos look better on the website if they are lighter rather than darker, and I increase the color saturation levels by about +50 for more colorful images.
3. More recently I have experimented with banner style photo cropping, as above. If you like the look of a photo on a website and want to use that size, in pixels or inches, then right click on it, go to “properties” on the drop menu, and it will display the image information. You can then use this information in the Irfanview program to customize your photos, by going to “Image” on the tool bar, and select the  resize/resample on the drop down menu. Now you can resize your photo to the preferred size, entering the number of pixels or inches to give you a banner size or a square, or a more traditional shape.

Getting the (web design) help I need!

Heather Holm from HolmPage Productions, http://www.holmpage.com has been my web designer for the past two years. During that time we have established a wonderful working relationship as well as friendship. I value her advice on design and graphics but it is a mutual relationship of educating each other in the areas that we each have expertise in that has made it such a valuable partnership. I craft the content and Heather artfully displays it, enhances the graphics, gives technical advice on new ideas, and generally ensures that my website looks the way it does.

I have also been dabbling in blogging software since last year with www.cansoBreeze.com, an e-zine on “wordpress,” a blogging platform, from http://www.wordpress.com.

Switching from an e-zine style to blogging in “Elizabeth’s blog on the ocean,” is teaching me how to adapt my writing style, but in both cases I am using all those image editing skills on Irfanview.

Photos are not just a great way to entice visitors to convert from a “browser” to a “purchaser” they are also a great way of introducing new content onto your website providing that all the alt and meta tags are put in- something that the webcrawlers love and keep coming back for, which of course translates into greater exposure for your website by the web search engines and more web traffic.