Latest Client Testimonial - IRS Limited

IRS Limited provides Radiation Protection Services in the UK. IRS needed a new website, to attract new clients. They also needed functionality to provide easy-to-use access to their extensive catalogue of research reports and conference papers.

Here is their testimonial:

West Town Web Services provided IRS with a much needed upgrade to our company website.

For us, collaboration was critical. As a busy SME, it was imperative that we received extensive support and guidance in each aspect of the re-design process. Tony delivered everything we required and more.

Working to an extremely tight deadline, his availability was nothing short of excellent and through engaging in open and frequent dialogue we were able to generate tangible results. We are now proud to operate a website that clearly and professionally communicates both our company and the services we provide to the marketplace. For a personal, interactive development experience, West Town Web Services are highly recommended.

James Moores, Business Development Officer, IRS Ltd
Latest Client Testimonial - IRS Limited

Six things you need on your hotel, B&B or Guesthouse website

http://youtu.be/0F4zg2Xah2E

Topics Covered in this video:

1. Grab the visitor’s attention.
2. Make it obvious what you offer.
3. Make it easy for people to contact you.
4. Provide online booking.
5. Provide a mobile version of your site.
6. Provide rich information about your hotel and the surroundings.

Transcription

“Successful hotel, bed and breakfast and guesthouse hotels have several things in common.

First of all they know how to grab your attention. When someone arrives at your site you have between 5 – 15 seconds to get them interested. The best way to do this is by having beautiful photographs basically on your home page. Better yet, use video because video is really captivating and gets peoples’ attention. So grabbing attention is the first step towards gaining a new customer.

Secondly now that you’ve got the attention of your visitor you need to answer the question “Should I stay at this hotel?” Make it obvisou what you offer and put this information on the home page of your website. Put the information somewhere obvious and make the information very very easy and simple for people to use. The more reasons you give for staying at your hotel, the more customers you will have.

The third piont is that now you’ve hooked the visito and you’ve proved that your hotel is a great place to stay, make it easy for them to contact you. Offer numerous different ways of contact, so for example, email, contact form, always display your telephone number prominently in the header of your webpage particularly on the home page of the website. Because the easier it is for people to contact you, the more enquiries you will receive.

Fourthly, make it very easy for people to search availability and also to book a room. A great system is the Booking Button solution from Siteminder. It is very simple for you as an owner to add this system to your website, it’s very simple to use. And it provides your visitors with an absolutely seamless booking experience. Online booking will definitely increase sales.

The fifth point is that between 20 and 30% of people now access the internet only through mobile devices such as iPads or mobile phones. So you’ve got to offer a mobile version of your site. Many hotels basically squish their existing website to fit on a mobile device and when they do this it just looks absolutely terrible and it’s unusable. You can confirm this by looking at your own site on a mobile phone to see what it looks like. If your website works well on a mobile device you are going to sell more rooms.

The sixzth point is that some people will come to your site, they will book and they will leave. Other people require more information, for example about the rooms, or they want to know what’s happening around the hotel, where they can eat, if they can go out for the evening. If you provide this information for them they are much more likely to book with you and stay at your hotel. Providing rich information helps sell more rooms.

That was very brief but I hope you found it useful. We are West Town Web Services, we build great value websites and help our clients to get more business online. We have a special value package for hoteliers, and owners of Bed and Breakfasts and Guesthouses. So if you’d like further information, please contact me on the email address below. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks very much.”



Six things you need on your hotel, B&B or Guesthouse website

Recommended videos have far more power, research shows

Search Engine Watch have reported data from Unruly Social Video Lab that provides some very useful insights into the power of recommended video.

Unruly Social Video Lab has tracked 329 billion video streams since 2006 through their in-house services.

Unruly Social Video Lab
The Search Engine Watch article

Recommended videos have far more power, research shows

How to filter my IP address and visits to my own site from Google Analytics data

How to make sure your visits to your website are not included in your Google Analytics data.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN8HqWxl40Y&feature=youtu.be

Topics discussed:
1. How to find your IP address
2. How to create a Google Analytics Profile
3. How to create a Filter and add it to the Profile

My name’s Tony Radford and in this short video I’m going to show you how to filter-out your IP address from your Google Analytics data. Now, why would you want to do that? Basically if you don’t remove your IP address from your results can mistake your own browsing activity for that of your web visitors. It’s pretty easy to do.

The first thing we need is our own IP address and we get that really simply. Just go to a new tab, go to the Google search bar and type something like what is my ip address. And there we go. So I’ll just copy that, paste it in here (notepad).

Then I go to the account I want to apply the filter to. So here’s my account. Now, we need to go into the admin area and what we need to do is to create a new profile. And when we create the profile we’ll add the filter. You create a new profile because we want to make sure we have one profile that’s got all the data that we haven’t done any filtering on, so that we can always fall-back to that profile if we want to see the full picture.

So I’m creating a new profile. It’s very simple. First thing we need to do is create the profile name. So … for example Block my IP address. Click on the time zone. And then we click create profile.

Then we create the actual filter. Add new filter. Filter name … Block my IP. Now filter type. We’re going to us a predefined filter, but it is possible to create custom filters and you can create some pretty complicated filters that way, but this is quite simple so … Our predefined filter is Exclude … Traffic from the IP addresses … that are equal to our IP address. So we just grab our IP address and click Save.

Now, our Profile with its Filter is selected, so if we go into the reporting we’ll see all the traffic that’s from my IP address actually filtered-out of the results we’ll have a much clearer picture of what’s actually really happening in your Google Analytics data.

Thanks very much.

How to filter my IP address and visits to my own site from Google Analytics data