How a website should look?

So today I want to talk about websites and in particular how your websites should look. If you want to increase your direct bookings, or if you want to increase your direct bookings at the same level that they're currently at and you don't want booking.com or the OTAs to take over, then it all begins and ends with your website. I always say to people, you've got to make sure that your website and your place, the first touch point that they come to you is just like walking through your door for the first time. If it's tidy and clear and clean and nice and bright and it's easy for people to navigate, then they're going to have a great first impression of you and your property and your business. So that's why you've got to make sure that within five seconds of someone being on your property being on your website, they know exactly what your property is all about and they know how to make a booking number one. If you've got a booking engine, go to there and check your booking reports. Every single one of them has booking analytics and they will be able to tell you exactly how many bookings are coming via your website. You've got the ability now to go onto your Google Analytics and see for yourself purely and simply. If you don't know how people are interacting with your website and how people are finding your website, how do you know on how to improve and how do you know on where to list your website? Secondly, what you're going to do is you're going to go to a website called search.google.com and test mobile friendly. So if you just go into Google Mobile friendly, test Google, put your website in and it will tell you if it is mobile friendly. You want to go to a website called tools.pingdom.com Again, that's tools.pingdom.com which is highlighted there. Input your website where it says test from. You've got all these different locations, just go to where the one that's not nearest to you and click start test. Now you want to make sure that that load time is less than 7 seconds max. Under 5 seconds is ideal. Why is that? Now as a generation and as a group of people, we have now got an attention span of less than five seconds. That means we've got an attention span which is less than 5 of goldfish. So we have to as quickly as possible grab potential customers attention and we have to make them stay on our website. One of the biggest reason why people leave website is it takes too long to load and when someone takes too long to load, they give up and they go back to Google search and guess what, they're not going to come back to your website. So let's go on to the onto the layout. The first five images is what sells your properties. Rather scrolling image, nice light bright images and again something that tells the person who is looking is exactly what your property is all about. Now you may have noticed when I flicked over to this a second ago, there's a pop up when someone lands on your website. This will come up. Now we have this image come up and I'm able to delay it for seven seconds after someone's arrived on our website. Now why seven seconds? Because like I said, if anybody stays on your website for after seven seconds, it means they're invested, it means they want to know more about you and they're pretty close to booking. Now if a guest simply clicks around it, it disappears. If they click on it, it takes them to here, they put the dates in and it, like I say, it does exactly what they want and they put the promo code into our booking engine and then to get the money off, off one page vertical websites are the future. Now what's a one page vertical website, I hear you ask. Well, as you can see the website at the moment looks like any other. You've got the menu options at the top, but if I click on them instead of loading to another page, it just takes them down. So this whole page here on the granary is a one page website, but it's a vertical website. So all the information is just on one page. Now you may be thinking why is this key if your website has got lots of different menus and when you click on a menu button it has to load up. We've already gone through it. Attention span is getting less and less. So you have to make sure that your website doesn't take a long time to load. And by doing this there's no load time at all. All it does is just move people down. As you can see what is scrolling across. Here are our latest Facebook reviews, our latest Google reviews and our latest TripAdvisor. Now what I've been able to do is I've been able to work with a company called Repurso. And basically what they do is they repurpose our content on our own website. So it's a little plugin that we use. Now the beauty of it is, is that it pulls in the latest reviews but I'm just filtering every four or five star review to show up here. So There won't be any danger of a one star review showing up and it's slating us, you know, it will only show the four and five star reviews, which is key. So what I've done, and I think it's really important is that after your little blurb about you, you put in what guests are thinking about you. And this is latest reviews. So these are ones that have come in over the last few days and weeks. Now if the guest wants to see more, they click on reviews and it's pulling in nine. Now I could have expanded that to 15 to 20, but I think nine is about right. Like I say, these are real reviews and if they were to click on this button here, it will actually take them to their actual review. And finally, as you can see when, when this first image first popped up. So think back to when you first saw it. What's the thing that stood out to you? It was the Book now button because it's in a box and it's different from everything else. Like I say, we want to make people click on this button as soon as possible. The top right hand corner of every website is what's called the buy in zone. It's where you need to make sure it stands out from the rest. And like I've said from the start, we want people to get to our Book now page and our booking engine as soon as possible. So that's why you create a button which is is different color from everything else and make it stand out. So right now you can see here Book now if they want to contact us, they click on there it comes, all our details. But if they click on the Book now button, it goes straight to there. If you've got any questions, if you've got anything that you want to ask me, please get in touch via email marketly.co.uk or you can just send me a message on Facebook. Alright, thanks for watching. I hope this has made sense. I would love for you all to get in touch with me afterwards.