How Good is Your Travel Website? Part 1 - Presentation

Tidy up your website

Go and look at your website with fresh eyes and try to be really objective and honest.

In fact, scrub that, far too risky.

Get someone to do it for you. Someone you trust who will tell it to you exactly as it is.

What words can be used to describe the look and feel of your site?

Crisp
Clean
Lush
Easy on the eye
Beautiful design
Visually stunning
Professional looking
Nice looking site mate!

OR

Old and tired
Cluttered
Confusing mess
Headache to navigate
Far too much red
Cluttered
Cheap
Amateurish

Like it or not, people judge your site to a large extent by how it looks. If it's nicely presented and easy to find your way around visually, people will stay longer and be far more likely to also:

• Take the actions you want them to
• Become a long term returning visitor (or customer)
• Bookmark, recommend, tell a friend
  

And lots more besides. One of the way smaller sites have consistently competed with massive businesses online is by managing to look as good as them and as big as them in a way they could never do on the high street.

There are times when it's worth comparing your website to a physical travel agency and this is one of those times.

When you walk through the door of your local travel agent's office, do you find:

Clean and tidy presentation
Lush and colorful travel images on the walls
Neatly laid out brochures
Easy to find your way to the service desk
A pleasant professional atmosphere

OR

Cluttered layout
Old Posters falling off the walls
People in scruffy clothes smoking and swearing
10 years worth of dust on every surface
An overpowering smell of cat pee

When people first visit your website make sure the experience is similar to walking into any other professional business setting and you will be off to a great start. Research has shown again and again that great design and presentation are often what make a difference in a website user's decision to get their credit card out or not, and indeed to take any other kind of action on a website - including spending more than 2 seconds there.

Many websites smell of Cat Urine - Keep your travel site beautiful!