Creating a website today has never been easier.

There are so many ways to create your holiday rental site, from simple drag and drop tools through to traditional coding in HTML. This ease of use leads many owners to undertake the challenge themselves and rightly so. However, being able to place some images and text on a page and publish it to the internet is only part of the process and this alone will not guarantee success. The most common complaint is that no one is finding your website and this even leads some owners to believe that a website is a wasted expense. This article briefly describes some of the other factors which should be considered when making your website if you want to have a professional looking site which people will find.

Page Layout

Pages should appear balanced without huge areas of empty spaces or overlapping errors. Space between content is a good thing but keep this consistent. Consistency is a key part of design and all pages should have a similar feel to them and use the same fonts. Limit the number of fonts used, avoid ones that appear to clash and do not use a font too small. Leave Comic Sans in the 90s. Remember that most visitors will scan your pages very quickly and are unlikely to read lengthy paragraphs describing your property so try to keep important details near the top of the page and more lengthy detail, lower down, making it optional to read.

Mobile Friendly

Does your website display on a mobile device without excessive scrolling and zooming? Google will rank lower, sites, which are not mobile friendly. For a holiday rental site, the best choice is probably a responsive layout, which adapts itself to varying device screen sizes. You should always test your website on at least Android and Apple phones and tablets, even if that means asking a friend to take a quick look. You may even consider disabling certain features on mobile devices to increase usability – an automatic slider for example is not great on a phone.

Image Quality

Photos should be good quality and edited to ensure optimum exposure, colour balance and composition. Taking photos indoors can be difficult due to the low light so use a tripod when possible. Try taking photos with all the lights on, even in the daytime, for a more welcoming look. Your photos form the main component of any website so if you are unable to create good ones, it could be well worth paying someone to do this for you. Your images are the key to attracting business and even a professional web designer can do almost nothing without a quality set of images.

Image Size

The #1 mistake I see in DIY websites and even some professionally designed sites is images that are significantly larger than required. Determining the required image size for a responsive layout can be tricky, as the images will appear at different scales depending on the browser window size. Imagine that you think you require an image no larger than 300×400 for some content on your page. You can place an image directly from your camera, which is 3000×4000, and it will look fine in your layout. This is because you told the browser to display the image at 300×400 so the image is scaled down to this size. However, it first must be downloaded and in this hypothetical case, the image will take 100 times longer to download than if the correct size had been used to begin with. This delay quickly adds up and will lead to noticeably slow loading pages. The author might not even notice this problem as the page under test has already been loaded into the browser cache or they have super-fast internet. An image which is slightly over sized is fine and will not have any major impact.

Royalty Free Images

One problem frequently encountered when designing a website is finding enough quality images. You may have plenty of images covering all the rooms in your property but when you come to presenting a famous landmark worth visiting, you may find you don’t have any decent photos to use on your site. Finding pictures using a search engine is easy and so is stealing these images. You cannot simply find an image and use it on your website. The image creator can easily locate the used image and force you to remove it or just as bad, report plagiarism to the search engines and your page will be unlisted. (This works, I’ve tried it)

So what can do you?

Several websites exist where you can download and freely use images they host. My favourite is Pixabay but the catch there is that you must first upload some of your own images to share. Others include Pexels, which seems to have no restrictions. I’m certain there are many more so now you know such sites actually exist, go out there and find ones which can help your design.

SSL Security

Google now ranks SSL sites (https) higher than non SSL (http) and some browsers are even warning users about sites which do not employ SSL. Secure Sockets Layer adds encryption of data from your pages to the server so elements like content forms will be more secure for your visitors. Choose a hosting company who offer free or low cost SSL.

SEO

SEO is a subject which would take a book to cover and is very much shrouded in mystery. Search algorithms are not public domain knowledge but there are some common sense steps, which should be considered for any site.

Text

Make sure your text actually mentions the terms you expect people to be searching for. Mention these terms more than once but do not overdo this or you will be penalised for going too far. Keep the text natural but relevant. Your home page should state very early on and very clearly, what exactly you are offering. For a rental property, a visitor should be able to determine where it is located and what size the property is, immediately from the home page. The decision to read further or leave, may be made within a second or two so do not expect people to read all your text to find the hidden details.

Titles, Headers and Tags

Search engines use titles to determine structure of page content. An H1 title is more important than H5 so try to avoid using titles within your pages simply to control font sizes. Start with H1 for your highest-level title and if the font is too big, then change the style, not the level.

Visit a search engine and enter some of your own URLs. If already indexed, your pages should appear in the search results. Is the text you see in the results, as you would like it? If not, then you should perhaps edit your page titles. You have control over how your site appears in search results.

Meta tags can also be used although Google say these are of lower importance these days than content. The meta tags can be used to desribe tha contents of the page to help search engines.

Images

Images should have meaningful names, not abstract numbers to give search engines more chance of indexing them. Alt tags should be used to give images a short description and this will be the text you will see indexed by search engines. You might have an image Living-Room.jpg with a alt text of “Luxurious living room with real fire”. If someone searched for “living room with real fire” you may appear in the results but if your image is called _12345x.jpg with no alt tag, then you will not appear in any results.

Avoid spaces in image names as this is classed as an error or warning by many browsers. It will not cause a failure but it might not help SEO.

Sitemap

A sitemap is an index to all the pages on your website which is used to aid search engines. The file will also indicate to the search engine crawlers, when to come back and check your site again. There are several free websites which can create this file for you or if using WordPress, there are even some plugins. If using Google Webmaster Tools with your website, you should let Google know where your sitemap file is located.

Domain Name

I actually wrote an article about this subject a few years ago. There are many conflicting arguments regarding what works best so this link is only my opinion and an approach, which has worked for me.