One of Bondi’s Best Kept Secrets
The Fredericks’ run a busy bed and breakfast on the shores of Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Over the Olympic period their Bondi Beach Homestay accommodation has housed many tourists including, to their surprise, some Paralympian gold medallists. Almost consistently booked out up to three months in advance they attribute some of their marketing success to their professional looking website, which has attracted international attention and continues to reach the top 10 across a number of leading Australian and worldwide search engines.
Success Tips
Bondi Beach Homestay originally built its own DIY-style website. Although the website wasn”t stunning it had sufficient content to explain rates, some information about Bondi Beach and how to make an enquiry or booking. As the Fredericks were not professional website designers, their website had all the basics and mechanics to look good but they had not included all the tricks of the trade including some extra ”meta tag” programming to get into the top 10 of the search engines. By hiring website designers to audit and evaluate their existing website, they were able to get a professional looking homepage with a WOW factor to attract new customers. They also paid for their designers to create one main graphic for all the secondary web pages and had some training in basic website design so they could make changes and add in new content.
Bondi Beach Homestay”s owners now have complete control over all changes and updates to their website, so when Bondi Beach had the new Beach Volleyball stadium erected and then dis-mounted they were able to keep the site up-to-date and change images and descriptions on their website accordingly at no cost.
Country Road Adventure Tours
Susan Fennelly operates a service business in the tourism industry. She recently achieved recognition for her efforts by winning her tourism category in the small business awards in the Penrith area. At that stage she decided to update her simple website to promote her services and products online – but until recently had not had much success. Since revamping her website with a new homepage, simpler navigation system, some new and improved images as well as adding in some features to get better placement in the search engines, Sue is now recording an average of 450 visitors daily.
Success Tips
Susan started with a simple DIY website to get the feel of what was needed regarding content and maintenance. It also gave her enough knowledge and understanding to know what to ask for when she approached a website designer.
Having tested the Internet as a marketing tool, Susan decided to take the plunge and hire professional website designers. After winning the award Susan wanted to take advantage of the free publicity so she called in her website designers and gave them 36 hours to revamp her homepage and develop the site structure to a 24-page website. Her web designers were able to do some simple text editing at a reduced ”typing priced” rate, as 20 of her web pages were individual tour pages with similar layout styles.
Marketing Your Small Business Online by Karen Scott S etting up a winning website doesn”t have to cost you a fortune. In this article Karen Scott showcases two small businesses and how they created professional, easy-to-navigate websites without blowing the budget. She also shares some tips which will make your website more effective and worth visiting.
