At the heart of any tourism or hospitality business’ digital marketing strategy, a modern, user-friendly website is an important investment. Here at World Web Technologies Inc. (WWT) we use WordPress to power our clients’ websites and we’d like to take this opportunity to tell you why.
While an HTML website built from scratch can easily cost a business upward of $10,000, WordPress, as an open-source platform, saves hotels and tour providers significant money and time. In a nutshell, working with WordPress – the Web’s leading content management system (CMS) – allows us to provide lodging and tour operators with a robust and flexible website in the most efficient and cost-effective way.
It Gives a Business More Control over Their Website
The easy-to- use WordPress content management system allows lodging and tour operators to log into their WordPress dashboard to update website content (add new pages and update text, images, blog posts, etc.) without any technical web design skills such as coding and programming. This means that once we’ve completed the design of your website, you can easily manage content modifications yourself.
Not having to rely on (or pay) your web designer to make simple content updates, such as adding descriptions of special packages or loading new images, gives you more control over your website and budget.
It’s Responsive
Most WordPress themes today are responsive, which means that the website automatically detects the device accessing it (be it a desktop computer or a smartphone, or anything in between) and adjusts layout and content for an optimal user experience on that device.
Because 94 percent of leisure travelers switch between devices when researching, planning and booking travel, it’s crucial for hotel and activity websites to perform well on all devices. A single responsive website ensures just that.
It’s Search Engine Friendly
WordPress offers built-in search engine optimization (SEO) features and best practices that, combined with the SEO know-how of your web designer, put your website in good standing with search engines.
WordPress serves up clean and simple code, keyword-focused URL structure, strong navigation functionality and easily generated XML sitemaps that search engines love. It also optimizes loading speed, images and, as mentioned above, the user experience across devices.
It Offers Lots of Great Plugins
From galleries and social media feeds to contact forms, Google Map embeds and event calendars, WordPress allows you to add enhanced functionality to your website at the click of a button using WordPress plugins. Offering a library of literally tens of thousands of plug-ins, WordPress makes it easy to add all kinds of cool features to your website, but the sheer variety of options can be overwhelming and not all plugins are created equal.
Here at WWT we are familiar with tried and trusted hospitality-website- friendly plugins and can recommend what will work best for your own website.
It Offers Fully Customizable Themes
WordPress also offers thousands of themes (template designs for the presentation of a website, including colors, font styles and page layouts), including many hotel-specific designs. With such an expansive portfolio of themes to work from, design time can be expedited to save our clients a great deal of money. Our web designers can customize any theme to match our client’s vision and business – and to make the design your own.
Using WordPress as our design platform, WWT streamlines the web design process to save you time and money while providing beautiful, high-performance websites expertly tailored to your business. We also offer an optional maintenance package with all our design projects, or you can choose to take care of site maintenance yourself.
Check out our design portfolio to see some examples of what we can do for you.