While this tweet is about real estate, it’s basically the same for inn, B&B and hotel websites: most of your potential customers are “buying” you sight unseen. This makes your website and the information you provide on it important. And it makes the use of clear, informative, compelling photos a necessity.

Rare is the restaurant that doesn’t have a website these days. Even rarer is finding a good one.

…

More damaging, to my mind, are websites which whether by omission or clunky design lack basic information.

Other problems he discusses include:

• lack of clean, logical overall design
• use of gimmicks like background music
• lack of interesting, fresh content (particularly blogs)

I’ve given my thoughts on some of these problems in this series of posts.

If you read the article, be sure to read through the comments to get an idea of how certain things on websites can really irritate your site’s visitors.

The focus is mostly on the startup/entrepreneurial side of things, but still a good write-up.

Thanks to Stephen, Kevin and the folks at Tnooz for the coverage.

The Oatmeal is a funny, irreverent site. Today they take on this topic and others in 8 Websites You Need to Stop Building.

Just over one-third of consumers (34%) report that a technical glitch will lower their likelihood of visiting a travel Web site again.

PhocusWright’s Consumer Response to Travel Site Performance.

A new survey of almost 3,000 leisure travelers indicates a very low tolerance for glitches on your website. We think this includes a number of the problems we discuss in our series, What’s Wrong With My Website?.

Are you comfortable that your visitors aren’t experiencing any of these “glitches” on your website?

Special thanks to Cheryl Paynter. Cheryl is the Director of Hotel Operations for D.P. Murphy Group, owners of Stanhope Beach Resort & Conference Centre. She said some great things about SiteValet. My two favourites are this one from the video:

We operate hotels. We don’t understand the technology of websites.

And this one, which unfortunately didn’t make the cut:

I don’t know why anybody in this business would build a website from scratch with something like SiteValet available.

Thanks to reporter Steve Bruce and his producer Tracy Lightfoot for inviting us and pulling this together.

Comments, thoughts, questions. Would love to hear from you in the comments section below.

Kuler is a website by Adobe that shows user-submitted color palettes. The palettes are very nicely presented. And you can filter/sort them by Most Popular, Highest Rated, and so on.

If you’re thinking of having a Custom or Semi-Custom Theme developed, take a look at Kuler for some ideas.

Note: these are visual mockups from our designers. The final themes may end up looking a little different.

They are both web applications where you enter in the URL of your website (or any website) and they will run a bunch of tests against it. After 15-30 seconds, they return with a score out of 100, and a pretty detailed report.

Both tools are testing two broad aspects of your website, each important to how your site performs from a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint:

1. On-site tests. These are things about your website’s content and the code behind it. These are techie things like sitemap.xml files, 301 redirects, the structure of you site’s HTML, etc.
2. Off-site tests. These measure your website’s presence on the web. How many sites are linking to you, etc.

Woorank appears to test more things, and provides a nice red/yellow/green indicator on each test. They also break the reports into clearer sections, including “In-Site SEO” and “Off-Site SEO.” But each has valuable information, so we always run both tests on any site we’re evaluating.

Even if you’re a little intimidated or overwhelmed by a lot of the information, give it a go. You’ll learn something about your website.

It’s a good idea to recheck every now and then to see how you’re doing and identify areas for improvement.

What score should you get?

There are too many variables at play here to say definitively. Popular blogs and websites (that are also well coded) can have scores in the high 90s. For most inn, B&B or hotel sites we look at good scores seem to range from the 40s to the 60s. If your site scores below 40 (and definitely if it scores below 30), you should be looking to make some improvements to your inn or B&B’s website.

Take the tests and let us know in the comments section what your scores are.