Friday 24 February 2012

North Berwick Bed and Breakfast Website Development

It’s been a busy few weeks for the team at Plan B with a number of new clients coming on board to take advantage of their newly launched Open Rooms MM12 website packages.

The Open Rooms packages were created and built around the needs of small hotels, guest houses, B and B’s and self-catering operations and are integrated fully with the award winning Bookassist Booking Engine.

Based on an ever expanding series of template strictures each site is then given a full make over which transforms the template into a bespoke designed fully content managed website with online booking from the start.

Emma and Tom at North Berwick Golf Lodge had used the team at Plan B previously to do some painless work on improving the content and search engine tags for their exclusive use property in East Lothian – a project that according to Emma had quite dramatically increased the targeted traffic through the site – and as a result had turned to them again when they needed a new website for their recently acquired Bed and Breakfast property.

The Open Rooms Lite package was perfect for the property; easy to manage and update and from outline discussion to completion was less than four weeks.

Ian McCaig of Plan B explained how it worked, “We were in the North Berwick area and popped in for a chat and to see the new property - Glentruim now known as The Golf Lodge B&B and were able to clearly map out what was required not only when the site went live but beyond too. Emma selected her preferred style and site map and gave us the launch copy on a disk helping us greatly! Copy and images are the two things that invariably hold up the launch of any website!”

“From that short briefing we took logos and colours from their other property and “branded” the new site, uploaded the structure and copy and secured approval for the design within the next seven days.”
Plan B dealt with not only the site design and content but the hosting, domain name registrations and all of the uploading and set up of emails and were delighted with the results.

“Whilst the sites are strictly speaking ‘templates’ they never end up looking that way and we hope that Tom and Emma were as happy as we were with the look and feel of the site”

One of the most critical pieces of the jigsaw in the Open Rooms suite is the online booking engine. A website must look good, it must have relevant content for customers and search engines but importantly it must also be able to convert. All the Open Rooms packages have been designed to fully integrate with the Bookassist Booking Engine and seamlessly move the customer from Awareness to Action.

The uploading of the room availability and training for the owners was done within forty eight hours and the site was launched within two weeks of being discussed and took its first direct online booking in the first 48 hours!

Emma Hill is delighted with the results, “Thanks to Ian and Stephen at Plan B, we now have a newly designed website which ideal for our businesses. All we had to do was choose our template and forward text and photos, etc. The rest was all completed for us. The new site is easy for us to manage ourselves, we can make changes whenever is required.  Plan B have also been working hard at maximising our online activity. We are also pleased to have the facility of the online bookings.  Not all clients' want to pick up a phone or e-mail to make a booking, so there is more flexibility in that they can book directly online.

Ian McCaig continued, “As the site beds in further we will start looking at how both the Golf Lodge and the B&B can proactively move forward. The website is the core of the online activity but does not sit in isolation; the next phase will build relevant content and effectiveness through social media channels, blog articles, promotion of the booking engine through Facebook and off line and development of programmes and packages built around key local events. Building a website is very much the first step, building the relationships to maximise the return on the site is an on-going process”  

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