Are you planning to make a website for your hotel, travel package or bed and breakfast business? In order to get more visitors to make a booking on your website, you have to provide a seamless experience that sells them on the best of what you have to offer. The great thing about creating a travel excursions website is that you can keep it simple. Here are 10 steps that you can follow to create a seamless travel excursions website.
Step 1: Start with Great Photography
When it comes to traveling, pictures always speak louder than words. Invest in high quality photography that gives your web visitors an idea of what to expect. A large collection of photos does a bulk of the job in selling the visitor on the travel excursion.
Step 2: Build a Connecting Story
One of the best ways to give your visitors a taste of the experience is to build a story. A visual based story that’s connected by the various pages on your website will give the visitor an immersive experience that text descriptions will never be able to do.
Step 3: Build Simple Navigation Menu
Don’t go overboard with your navigation menu. In almost all cases, a simple menu on either the left hand side of your website or on the top fold part of your website should suffice. Keep the menu to a minimum and focus on linking to pages that are relevant to the visitor. This can be anything from the photo gallery, appointment booking page, directions, services page, to the contact us page.
Step 4: Provide the Right Context
If you’ve done a comprehensive job in building a portfolio of travel photos, the next step is to provide the right context to your photos. Think about what photos would work best to sell the visitor on the travel excursion. Then provide the right context and create strong descriptions that support your photos.
Step 5: Create a FAQ Page
Want to reduce your emails while providing value to your visitors? Simply build a FAQ page. Compile a large list of questions and answers based on what potential customers and recent visitors are asking you about. Many visitors actually prefer FAQ pages because they don’t have to wait for a reply email and can find the information they need right away.
Step 6: Use Google Maps to Provide Directions
Google maps is used by many businesses to help people find their locations. It allows visitors to enter their address and get multiple routes for how to get to the destination. You can get one for your website by following the instructions on the Google Maps AI page located at the following link:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/adding-a-google-map#key
Step 7: Supply Information on Nearby/Local Resources
Understand that you probably won’t be taking care of all your customer’s needs. You need to provide them with information on nearby resources, accommodations and activities. This can be anything from a kayak rental business, local restaurants, to hospitals. People will be more likely to make a booking if they learn about all the resources that are accessible.
Step 8: Consider Using Multimedia
If you want to take the extra step in selling your travel excursion services, then create a video or virtual tour guide for your visitors. Don’t take shortcuts when creating videos or virtual tour guides. A poorly created video or virtual tour guide can make your services worse than it really is. You also have to make sure that the technical side taken care of so that most browsers will be able to load and interact with the multimedia without any problems.
Step 9: Create a Large Call to Action that’s Always Visible
If the goal is to get the visitor to make a phone call or make a booking online, then you have to make sure that you have a prominent call to action that spans your entire site. The best place to place this call to action is on the top fold of your site. A good position for your call to action is on the top right side (right next to your header). Make sure that you the call to action button is large and the font of your telephone number has good readability.
Step 10: Optimize Your Website
Don’t forget to optimize your travel website if you want to generate search engine traffic. Make sure your title includes the location of the destination, the brand of your business and the description of what you’re offering. Using your target keywords and words/language that is thematically tied to what you’re offering in your content will also give your search engine rankings a big boost, so try to be as descriptive as possible.
As you can see, the steps laid out in this article are fairly straightforward. There no need make a website complex. All that’s need for creating a great travel excursions website is solid structure, great photography and the right information for your visitors.
