Vacation Rental Website Design - the Techie Bits

A great vacation rental website design needs to be attractive and user-friendly. Underneath though, there's some technical wizardry that you need to get right to make your site work on the web. Here's a useful list, in no particular order:

1. An Email Autoresponder

Offer something useful to your readers in exchange for their email address, such as a free list of tips for the local area around your vacation rental. Then follow up with them occasionally with news about your property, local events, special offers and promotions, etc. It's a great way to remind people about you and your place. Remember to keep the content fresh and interesting - what would you like to read about regularly about a vacation rental that you've stayed in before?

2. Clean HTML and CSS Code That Passes Validation

OK, this is true for any site. This helps you to build a website that works consistently across all the web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, etc) and also helps search engines to see as much of your site as possible (this is a good thing).

3. Use CSS Stylesheet in a Separate File

Avoid tables at all costs (unless you're creating a table of rental prices, local events, etc). This won't make your site more successful but it will make your life easier when it comes to adding or changing pages, changing color schemes for summer, or adding a new page header. It also makes the HTML code of your site simpler and shorter and therefore easier and quicker for search engines to crawl - this is also a good thing.

4. Links to Your Social Networks - Facebook, Twitter and Delicious

OK, this shouldn't be too technical, but it's a great place to connect with new visitors. Create a Facebook fan page for your property, tweet about local events and bookmark useful sites for car rentals, restaurants, parks, etc. If you add these links prominently on your site it gives people a different path to contact you and get to know you. Sometimes they don't want to make a 'full contact' via your contact form - they may not trust you yet. Getting to know you via your Tweets or by looking at how you interact with Facebook friends is a gentler approach that many people prefer these days.

5. User-Friendly Navigation

Think of it like the roots of a tree, where your vacation rental website home page is the trunk and the pages divide and spread out into groups of related topics. Sensible navigation is one of the secrets to good SEO on your site. Use HTML lists (<li>, <ul>, etc) for navigation links and leave the styling to the CSS file (see above)

6. Right Use of Keywords

Choose keywords that your customers search for (check out some free tools such as Wordtracker of Google AdWords for ideas). Use the keywords in your titles, page URLs, headings, link anchor text and in the content.

7. Website Stats and Analytics

Check your site traffic to see where visitors come from, what keywords they use and what they read when they've arrived. Then you can do more of the good stuff (e.g. write more pages around the keywords that work) and sort out the bad stuff.

8. Local Search Information

If you want your place to show up in a local search on Google, Bing & co then add plenty of local information to your site. Try adding your property address prominently on the site (in the description tag too) and add a Google Map. Head over to Google local listings and add your property there too.

OK, hopefully these ideas aren't really that technical. These are all important things that you can (and should) do yourself with your vacation rental website. Leave a comment and let me know what works for you.