Hoteliers, Your New Website Is Waiting – But Do You Build Or Buy?
This is an excerpt taken from SiteMinder's Blog. View the full article here.
We live in exciting times. I believe we will look back on this period as the age of technological entrepreneurship. Technology is allowing entrepreneurs to both invent new experiences and to challenge the way we are used to doing things by reimagining them. Never have we seen so many successful technology businesses – inside and outside of travel – being launched so rapidly.
I have recently been following some interesting debates around whether hotels should utilise a cloud-based, 'instant' website creator solution to rapidly launch their (new) website and subsequently maintain it themselves, or if they should engage a third-party website developer/agency to build a custom-made website from the ground up.
There are hundreds of thousands of hotels in the world with websites that are severely impacting those hotels' ability to attract and convert guests online. These websites are not responsive on mobile, they are image-poor, they lack functionality, the content is dated because it is too hard and time-consuming to keep it up-to-date, and they are lacking the structural components used by search engines to find them. In short, they are essentially invisible on search engines like Google. So, what options do hotels have to bring their shopfronts into the light, attract guests and compete effectively against other hotels and also OTAs for the guest booking?
We at SiteMinder have proudly just launched our latest product, Canvas – an easy-to-configure, cloud-based website creator and editor for hoteliers. Canvas allows hoteliers to easily generate visually-stunning, functional and secure websites very quickly with no design skills required, no coding skills required, and no requirement to host anything onsite. Hoteliers have full access to switch between design themes, colour schemes, layouts and fonts – and to change any bit of content – on any page at any time, themselves, through an easy-to-use administration portal. This means they can make unlimited changes at no additional cost. They can create and customise as many pages as they like, when they like. A hotelier can get up and running within a day without the need for a web developer or designer.
Now, full disclosure here: I don't have a single design-oriented or graphically-capable bone in my body, and so from the outset I tasked my team to create a product that I could personally use to create a great-looking website in less than an hour. I created one in less than 40 minutes. We were ready for [Canvas'] launch at that point, because I knew any hotelier could do the same.
For the purpose of this post, I will refer to product offerings like Canvas as 'website creators' and analyse how these shape up as an option against building a custom-made hotel website built from scratch.
Hotel website creators VS custom-made hotel websites
As with all technologies that are new, you will get your naysayers that insist it is impossible to get the same result from a faster, ready-made, more automated solution as from a solution that's built manually and at a significantly higher cost. That is, until that new piece of technology becomes the mainstream and everyone forgets that we used to have to build things like websites from scratch each time they needed a major overhaul, because people can no longer imagine doing it in such a slow, expensive and cumbersome manner.
Consider the parallel of robots that build products in factories. At first it was inconceivable that robots could do a human's work. Yet today they can produce products not only faster and cheaper, but with better quality results as well. Let me repeat that: with better quality.
Of course, like anything else in the world you get different levels of product offerings out there. Not all website-generating and content management technologies are great, but the ones that will flourish are those that continually refine themselves to achieve the same, if not better, website results than custom-made development projects were ever able to achieve.
When technological advancements challenge our views of what's best, inevitably there will always be an ideological discussion between those who seek to preserve the way things have always been done, and those that seek to drive change for the better. If we didn't have the latter, we would still be in the dark ages.
So, here are some of the facts underpinning this discussion and seven of the top myths that the naysayers will promote in order to convince you that a custom-made, 'build it from scratch' website is the only way to go.
About SiteMinder
SiteMinder Limited (ASX:SDR) is the name behind SiteMinder, the only software platform that unlocks the full revenue potential of hotels, and Little Hotelier, an all-in-one hotel management software that makes the lives of small accommodation providers easier. The global company is headquartered in Sydney with offices in Bangalore, Bangkok, Barcelona, Berlin, Dallas, Galway, London and Manila. Through its technology and the largest partner ecosystem in the global hotel industry, SiteMinder generates more than 115 million reservations worth over US$45 billion in revenue for its hotel customers each year. For more information, visit siteminder.com.
Maria Cricchiola
Director of Brand Communications & PR
+61 2 9056 7415
SiteMinder
