Oxford Accommodation Website

This site came to me as a referral - by the person who was selling the apartment!

The previous owner suggested to the new owner that I create a website, which I did. I quite liked the site, but the new owner never really had any marketing ideas and thought that creating a site was enough to guarantee bookings 52 weeks of the year.

The real shame is that the site went quickly to a PR5 and stayed there. I never worked out what in particular made it so popular with the search engines, but something did.

What I do notice though is that the previous owner's site was also PR5 for a time, then dropped. So I expect that the previous owner had the site listed in a good directory then removed it for whatever reason, but suggested to the new owner to get listed there. She did and benefitted.

The site has a load of useful functions and she did intend to develop it further into a directory, but seemed to loose interest. The accommodation has got some bookings, but it's not an easy game to be in.

Villa Website

This is without doubt the site that's taken me the longest to build and ended up with the biggest database and largest number of pages.

It's all about villa rentals, but unlike my cottage holidays sites, this isn't built from someone else's database. With this site owners can sign up to advertise their holiday villa and chose between paying a fixed annual fee or a commission per sale.

Cottage Rental Website

This cottage rental site is a sister site to the first cottages website - it's a different look and optimised for different phrases, but it uses the same database.

Both were intended to drive affiliate commissions for me and the first site was doing really well, so I was hopefully that 2 sites would do great! This site didn't really pick up much traffic at first and I took my eye off the ball with both and traffic dropped because of the duplicate content filter (presumably) in Google.

I worked on this site and the traffic picked up quickly, now I'm working on a total refresh of the orignal site. The problem with both sites (at the moment) is that I take the database, build the sites using Perl on this machine and then FTP them. If the connection is unreliable, the FTP can fail several times and take hours to run. This means that I struggle to get the monthly updates done.

Going forward, I'll be loading the data straight to a database, which takes 5 minutes. From there I'll generate the pages, heavily depending on php includes to reduce the size of the file produced. There are a few other ideas for the refresh of both sites - should go well, but I'm keeping the ideas under my hat for now!

Hotels Website

This one was another idea of my own - another affiliate scheme I worked with for a while, and still do promotes occasionally. But the site didn't get the traffic I wanted, was hard to maintain (hence the low traffic...) and I'd thought of a different way of running it so decided to change tack.

So how did this one go wrong? It was a good idea, but it just took a huge product feed (10,000 hotels), split them into regions and expected people to find them. There was no real attempt to provide anything new - no original content. And my update method involved building the whole site on my laptop (using perl scripts) and then uploaded. 10,000+ hotels, plus relevant regions - it was never going to work!

Worse still, after I registered the URL I did a search on it and found various references to it in Google - but they were before I registered the site. Then I started to read these references and the previous site owner had basically destroyed the reputation of the site with search engines and so got out.

So it was an uphil struggle and I never really got the site a suitable page rank, so I surrendered when the site was up for renewal and let it expire.

The affiliate scheme was a good one - but like many ideas, it's on the back burner as there's too much other work waiting to be done.

Holiday Rental Villa Website

This was (and still is) a nice site that I get on with the owners well, even though I've never met nor spoken directly to them! Only ever emailed these customers, as with a lot.

They approached me for a quote when they were preparing to leave this country and set up their new rental business in Spain. They liked the quote, but decided to hang on until they were up and running before getting the site live. But I suggested we start straight away so that the search engines had chance to find the site. By including fresh photographs of the villas being built, it was also a very good way of showing friends and family back home the latest progress.

Eventually the villas were ready and we went ahead and built a full site, which they still continue to update regularly. Of course, for the first part of the life of the site, displaying the progress of the build, I gave them that as a freebie. So they were really pleased.

Cottage Holidays Website

This is another of our own websites and one that has served us really well over the years. But, as I often write, it's in need of a bit of work now.

I did try to update the site a few weeks ago, but only got half way through it before work loads prohibited further changes, and to be honest, it's in dire need of finishing off.

It's a shame, really, because over the years it's more than earned it's keep in affiliate revenues and Google Adsense alike. Each has earned far more than I would have charged for such a site.

The basic idea is that we take a feed of aroun 1,700 cottages in the UK, add a few more from other feeds and produce this static site. There's loads more feeds I could integrate, but I just need the time.

This has got to be one of the top of my hit list to refresh, especially as when I just looked at it I found a couple of broken links.

Hopefully, by the end of February, a new version will be live. Shame it will have missed peak booking season. Oh well, there's always next year...

Holiday Flats Website

This was a simple website to advertise new a holiday flats business on the south coast.

Just a simple website to show what they had to offer. We had to convince the owners that they were not writing a tourist guide to the area as every bit of text sold the beauty and features for miles around, yet nothing mentioned the flats.

That's an important point to remember when creating a holiday flats website. The visitor to your website is almost certainly sold on visiting the general area, so concntrate on selling what you have to offer over what another place offers. If there are attractions within an easy reach then the availability of these attractions is what you should feature, not why your visitors should visit them, which could equally well apply to accommodation 50 miles away.

When creating a holiday flats website include photographs of any special features - roll-top baths, double showers, BBQ areas, four poster beds etc. Also mention all your special features in the text. But don't try to sell the general area to the visitor - that's probably already taken place.

Holiday Flat Website

When business was slow as we were taking off, we did concentrate on trying to get holiday accommodation websites up and running. We saw it as an area of the market that wasn't saturated, but where the websites were needed as people were likely to be booking on the internet.

As it happened, this customer was a result of general advertising, but with a bit of enthusiasm he soon became a customer.

He was advertising his apartment in Portsmouth, overlooking a harbour. The picture in the background of the site was actually taken in Liverpool's Albert Docks and it is from when the Grand Turk visited quite a few years ago (the ship used to film the early episodes of Hornblower). The Grand Turk is now in Whitby, but that is an aside from this site!

The site looked good, showed plenty of pictures and held a really nautical theme, but even with Google Adsense he wasn't able to generate the consistently booked apartment he had hoped for. He had set the apartment up as a really trendy, modern apartment with internet access and other benefits, but the income, of course, had to reflect this. To compete with neighbouring apartments he had to keep the rentals low but be booked all year round - a difficult job for any rental. I think in the end he decided to cut his loses and sold the apartment.

Holiday Accommodation Website

This is another holiday accommodation site that stayed with us until the owner's retirement earlier this year.

This website was for a small bed and breakfast in Suffolk. Advertising holidays in Suffolk, the website showed the accommodation and what the owner had to offer and dealt a lot with the nature aspect around her property.

We came into contact with this customer through mass mailings. One of the earliest mailings was received by her, just as she was contemplating a site. This gave us great hopes and we increased the mailings, never to get another positive response!

In The Beginning...

This is where it all started way back when - probably even before we'd thought of the web design business.

This website took on many forms - and I must say that now I look back and none were particularly great. But it worked. It was a website for my in-law's holiday flats designed to show off one or two rooms. Without a great deal of work the site was being found by people across the country and in the USA - bookings were coming in.

I originally used a free tool to create the site, then rewrote it in HTML and published it to free space. It was a long time before a domain name was purchased for this site - the free names were used at first.

It did use javascript throughout the last version. For some reason I thought that was good, not only for scrolling messages but to write the header & trailer of the pages. It was a nightmare to change!

But it did them well until they retired from the business and I let the URL go as the building is now used as residential flats rather than holiday accommodation. I learnt a lot of lessons, and it allowed me to start a portfolio that early customers could look at.