Follow these best practices for hotel website design:

• The website should feature large landscape photos of your hotel, rooms, facilities and the surrounding area to entice people to continue to browse the website and make a booking. It should accurately depict your property in a positive light. The photos should also be high resolution images
• Easy to use website navigation. Viewers should be able to find the information they want quickly and easily. A poorly designed website will result in a poor user experience and low conversions on the site.
• Include photo galleries, videos, virtual tours, e-postcards, interactive maps and web cams to sell your property and the destination. According to a survey by PhoCusWright, 89% of users said video influenced their booking decision.
• Ensure that the content is relevant and provides the user with enough informative to make an informed decision. This is good for SEO and humans!
• Your website should be SEO friendly - this includes page layout and navigation so search engine crawlers can visit the site and easily crawl through the site and index your webpages, relevant website copy, use of H1 and H2 headers, including a page title, description tags and keyword tags on all webpages, including a Google sitemap and page links in the footer.
• Include a booking button on every page of the website
• Include social media icons on your website - including Facebook, Twitter, blog, LinkedIn, TripAdvisor widget, calendar of events, competition etc.

Conclusion
Your hotel website is not only the main revenue generator for the property, but it is your shopfront and will be the first place travel shoppers will visit to get more information about your property, the rooms, and rates. Thus, it's very important to optimise and design the website to meet industry best standards and customer expectations.

So if you are considering getting a new website for 2012, speak to the travel marketing consultants at TA Fastrack today on 07 3040 3588.