How should I prepare an attractive website for my travel business idea?
I'm interested in any good ideas for preparing a website for my travel business. I need my site after completion to generate more traffic and give better turn over results for my investment.
It will be very easy if you use the help of some specialised services for this purpose. For example, take a look at the one from https://weblium.com I think it is a really great company the guys from which will make a perfect website for your needs. You will surely like working with them, good luck with it ;)
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Prefer attractive feature at second priority. A simple website can be nice if not very fancy. Once you're done with the homework with the help of strategist, you can find a good design and development agency/freelancer . i would like you have a sneak peek at a website i developed few months back http://qwikfix.co.uk/thomas-cook-contact/
if you mean "attractive" in the sense of looking good I'd say don't worry about that right now. Anything a skilled developer makes will "look good" because that's just a part of what they do. Instead focus on making it convenient and intuitive to the end user. Make a diagram for how you want it to function and draw little boxes showing what elements you want on each page and popup pane. This will make life a lot easier for the we developer and give them a good starting point in terms of knowing how to lay the site out. Even if something isn't so great of an idea it still helps because they'll have something visual to go off of and can make whatever tweaks to the idea they need to make to improve on the User's experience while being able to stay on the same page with you and show the improvements.
That's the most challenging part of building an effective website and once that's squared away making it look pretty is just polishing it before deployment. Generating traffic to it will done through your marketing of course which I can't really speak on because I don't know who you're targeting or what type of message you need to deliver but if you make the functionality of your site resonate with how computer savvy they are it will make them rely on it more than others. For example, if you're targeting people 50+, you might want to use larger fonts and give more emphasis to the different panes and pages to help them know what each one is for so they don't get lost or confused. Where if you're targeting people 35 and younger, a lot of that stuff is already second nature to them so you don't need to do any digital hand holding to keep them on track. So keep your main audience and their level of computer knowledge in mind too when laying out the site. Also think about how it can translate to the size of a cell phone too because what's clean and organized on a computer monitor can easily become cluttered and confusing when browsing on a smaller device. As long as you put some serious thought into these things and map your ideas out on paper a web developer will be able to take it from there and work out all the kinks.
For such a task, I'd like to recommend you to use some templates for different website builders. You can easily download a free one from http://www.webstarts.com/designs and customise it if you need. Such a method will surely work great for you
You hit the nail on the head with your last sentence! YOu need to find a web developer who is more than a developer - one who really listens and understands your needs. You could spend $500 or $5000 but if neither accomplishes the goal and brings in the revenue than both are wasted dollars. Look for value, not price. And a developer that will listen. You should be able to tell right away at the beginning interview - do they ask about what you want to accomplish. Or do they just want to know what you need so they can get down to giving you a quote in the fastest time possible?
Hello! I guess, you can easily make such a website with the help of Wordpress of any other CMS. Just take a good looking template for it from http://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-themes.php service, for example, and customise it a little. It always works great for my needs :)
I agree that a good portion of designers are using Wordpress however, I also agree that you might consider hosting your site on an ecommerce platform like Shopify. You can either hire a designer or choose from templates that are already existent and I would suggest that you consider using "responsive' designs as those will look great on tablets and mobile phones, which is where a bulk of the traffic will come from.
It should be aesthetically pleasing and easy to use; don't add excessive pages with fluff content. Be direct and to the point on all of your pages and make sure to use the blog platform on whatever platform you end up choosing. Blogs are premium for traffic, you can use tags, proper keyword density on each blog post etc. Also include Social Media share buttons on all pages, especially your blogs. Also consider using a Social Media Management platform or provider to post your blogs, pictures and content across platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, with major concentration on Pinterest and Instagram. With a niche like Travel, images move mountains in terms of traffic, you'll want to use high quality images on Instagram and Pinterest with proper Hashtagging etc.
I spent 7 years in the travel industry, so I can tell you look at what you competition is doing and offer a better value proposition and user experience.
If you are planing to to do it by your own, you need to analyse what you really need in that website, Normally people ask how much it cost. Here cost is a variable, You can do a website for 200$ to may be 10,000 $ as an example. As Mr Badger says you can even build in Word press.
I can give you an approximate costing, if you can answer me the following questions.
What type of travel website are you planning?
Is it just an information website and you do the booking manually?
Does it involve online booking facility with payment gateway?
What type of booking you prefer, Is it Bus,Flight or tourism packages?
For the same requirement , you may find people charging different prices, it varies , so you need to decide how much you need to spend, I can help you to find the best prices.
While it's true that many business web sites are designed in Wordpress, you want to work with someone who can get your site working with eCommerce so it works without glitches and headaches. Do you want to sell packages online? Do you want a user interface where you can collect a mailing list of potential new customers? Be sure to consider these factors in the design and implementation of your site.
We design affordable sites for eCommerce. Please let me know if I can be of assistance.
Correct, the first question is.. do you have a budget to have someone do this for you. If the answer is yes, I would love the opportunity to design a travel site for you designed to be a lead generation funnel.
We can talk further on the phone if you'd like.
Sam
hope you can just send down to me your cost breakdown for designing a travel bus site.
When you say more traffic, does it mean you already have a website?
Best and time saving is to hire a strategist to help with your target audience persona and website structure that's focused on generating business. Focus more on getting a practical and simple website. Prefer attractive feature at second priority. A simple website can be nice if not very fancy. Once you're done with the homework with the help of strategist, you can find a good design and development agency/freelancer (may be on mosaichub itself) to follow the architecture and create a site.
Second, do the homework yourself and find a REALLY GOOD designer to follow up. This should be of good help in planning > http://www.sunitabiddu.com/conversion-rankings-website-architecture
Feel free to ask more questions. Happy to help.
Second this motion!
You should concentrate on utility rather than attractiveness.
Second priority would be usability (simple would accomplish this)
People use transactional websites to make their life easier........
For example, there are some very attractive gaming sites that I would never visit.
Good Luck!
Doug
PS - Scope is VERY important . For example, is this just for lead generation or actual booking? Makes a huge difference in time, cost, & complexity.
The first question I have is are you wanting to do it yourself or to have someone do it for you. If you are wanting to have someone do it there are lots of really good web site designers available. You could either look for someone locally or find similar sites in your industry that you find appealing and contact the people who did those.
On the other hand if you wish do try and do it yourself then my recommendation would be to use WordPress. It is totally free and virtually every hosting company has it available. It installs with one click. There are tons of tutorials showing you how to do it on YouTube. There are hundreds of free templates as well as some really spiffy paid ones available. Most of the sites now are responsive which means they show well on any device from a phone, a tablet or a computer. There are two different WordPress's. One is at WordPress.com and one at WordPress.org. You want the one at Wordpress.org. Don't use the one at dot com. You should be able to get a very attractive site up quickly with WordPress. If you have any other questions let me know and I will try and help.
Thank you Ray, of course i need someone else to design it for, I`m not an expert with web designing. I`m wondering if WordPress free virtual could be suitable for the business website?
25% of all websites including business sites are based on WordPress and that number is growing rapidly. Lots of professional web designers use it and likely most use WordPress or some of the other CMS options such as Joomla or Magento. Some of the companies using it are major businesses. There are hundreds of themes already available for the travel industry that are quite beautiful. If you have the budget however having a professional do it would probably be better since they can customize it easier if need be but don't be surprised if whoever you use does use WordPress or one of the other CMS systems.
@ Akhil,
Just a tour operator
for starting, it will be an information based website, with manual booking form that will be linked to our email. NO online payment.