Its amazing to me how many Innkeepers do their own websites. Unless you do this for a living, leave this to a pro. If you want to save money, then find a different way to save. This is the front door to your business. If people think it looks old and outdated, they wont open it. Go search some websites. You could have the best property and do the worst business if you have a bad website..
Totally understand that but it's $7000 we don't have. If I got a 'professional' site would it bring in $70000 in business? Not likely. I need a 10-fold return to farm out something I can do myself.
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I made enough extra reseravations during our first month of our new site to pay for the new site. So to answer your question, YES it will! I didn't think it would either but it will! So you have to ask yourself, is $7000 a good investment to make $70,000.00? Over the last 3 years with our new site I have doubled that. I was the one who designed our site before and added things to it. My wife finally came to me one day and asked me what I thought of our site. I told her it was great. She then showed me some examples of other sites and asked if it would hurt my feellings if we had someone build us a new site. I was kinda upset at first and then swallowed my pride and decided to do it. $7000 is a lot of money. I'm still kicking my self because of the amount of money we have lost because I thought I was the man and could do our own website. Its your right to do your own. Please don't be mad at me. Just trying to tell you what happened with my website upgrade!
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Yes, your new website is very nice and a step up from your previous site. My project for next off season is to buy a template and redo the site so it no longer it a home built site. At 70 pages it will take some time to accomplish everything I want to do. I still like the creative control. Can you make updates on the fly to your site or do you need to file them with Acorn and let them do the updates?
I hate the idea of being in a queue and waiting to add photos or text or packages.
I've seen sites done by Acorn that were not up to their usual standards and the owner of the site told me it was $7000 for the site and there were maintenance fees and update fees and then the photographer fees as well. I guess if we get a windfall we'll consider it.
However, it would take more than a year to recoup the investment and there are a hundred other things the property needs.
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