Mini Websites: In Conjunction with Our Inns & Our Gites
Just about everyone and their dog (usually their cat actually) has a website these days. So you probably figure that you should have one too and that's fair enough: we've no problem in taking lots of money off you if you want a full scale website.
But what you need to ask yourself is "will spending £300 on a website generate more business than spending that £300 elsewhere?". In your first year or two, the answer almost certainly is "no". The reasons behind this essentially stem from the initial 6 to 9 months that you'll lose through your website being in the google "sandbox" (ie not being visible to searchers) and that in the early days, you won't know what to tell the designer to put into the website. Taking that £300 and using it to subscribe to visitfrance and frenchconnections will give you an instant placing on google and bookings to follow too.
So why does anybody pay for a website then? Well, to be honest a lot of it stems from the argument that you "must" have a website because "everyone else" does (and even these days everyone doesn't have a website). The valid business reason is that the £300 upfront for a website is largely a one-off cost whereas those visitfrance and frenchconnections subscriptions will fall due again next year.
What we're offering with our mini-websites is a middle ground.
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The cost is much lower: just £25 instead of a more typical £300 for a full-scale site. In practice, our "mini" website will be just as large as many a £300 site and in fact the main difference is that you'll only have one long page rather than several smaller ones.
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There won't be a 6-9 month lead time before your mini-website appears on google and you should normally expect it to pop up on searches within a week.
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You can even have your own domain pointing at your miniwebsite (we recommend this as it'll build traffic to your site for the day when it is economic to have a full-scale site).
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If in due course you do decide to have your own full-scale, we'll put a redirect on our site (no charge)so all the visitors that your mini-website was receiving will go directly to your main site (you're not tied to using us as the designer for that).
I think you'll agree that there doesn't seem to be a downside in having a mini-website.
What'll you get for the £25?
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a website similar to our example for Mas Camps with a link from your ourinns/ourgites entry to it
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assistance (if required) with the preparation of various search engine topics related to the page eg the title, description and keywords
What we'll need from you is text and photos in the following areas:
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introduction
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something about your rooms and place generally
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a bit about your catering (if applicable)
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the local attractions
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how to get to your place
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reservation/pricing information
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contact information
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policies eg children & pets
Which covers just about everything that you'd have in a full-scale website.
The £25 covers all amendments required for the year in which you pay it up to the end of the following year. After that, it will be £10 in any year that you make an amend to the text/photos.
What if you're on ourinns.org and chambre-dhote.org? Well, I can do a French version of the page for another £15 but as the French don't use the Internet much, I wouldn't bother paying it if I were you (your chambre-dhote entry will pull in just as much business). If you're on ourinns.org and ourgites.org, another £10 will get you a page within ourgites if the ourinns page is the same; if not it'll be between £10 and £25 depending on how different the pages are.
If you'd like your own domain name (and we recommend that you go for this), we can arrange it for between £2 (for a .co.uk domain) and £10 (.com) per year. We'll advise you how to set this up as we don't think it's prudent to have your domain under the control of your website designer.
If you already have your own website but are paying a fortune to have it hosted, you could move it into the ourinns structure for a £15 setup charge and £10 per year thereafter.
If I've convinced you, drop me a line (web@crystalconsultancy.com) and we'll get underway.
We've priced things in sterling as that seems to be an appropriate common currency but if you think in euro, the prices would be 35€ (£25) and 14€ (£10). Payment can be by paypal (in sterling or euro), transfer to our UK account (sterling) or by credit card (euro, Amex, Mastercard or Visa).