When you build a hotel website, you’re competing to impress travelers who are searching for the perfect place to stay. This means that your site should be welcoming, easy to navigate, and beautiful. It needs to showcase everything that your hotel has to offer.
As a busy hotel owner, opt for an impactful website design that integrates your brand colors and logo. Your ideal site will include useful features, an easy-to-use interface for your content, and it won’t cost you a fortune.
Impress with vivid imagery
Guests from near and far shouldn’t encounter any language barriers when it comes to your savvy photography. An image-forward website theme, such as Goran, will highlight your hotel’s most appealing qualities, like its stylish rooms and exterior, pool, cafe, and even a close-up of a tantalizing meal or two. Click Open Live Demo within Goran‘s info page and imagine your promotional photos living on its full-width page templates. This theme (like all WordPress.com business-oriented themes) automatically adjusts your imagery, pages, and posts to fit across any screen size and device. You can combine Goran’s features with marketing tips from Hotel Marketing Coach to make it easier for guests to learn more about your offerings.
Build your brand with color and style
Have you ever noticed that business advertisements and marketing materials typically feature that company’s logo colors? That’s because it’s a way to build brand awareness. Color also evokes certain emotions and can encourage a response from ad or site viewers. While you browse through fitting themes for your hotel’s online home, explore the color options available, or look for themes that let you customize colors to align with your brand or logo.
If you haven’t settled on brand colors or a logo design yet, have no fear. There are affordable (and free) tools available, like Canva.
Add functionality with plugins
Typically, travelers prefer to arrange their bookings online, which saves you time. Consider taking advantage of a WordPress.com plugin-enabled plan to deploy custom buttons and plugins that make it convenient for guests to book a stay with you. A booking plugin, such as WP Booking System, directs your guests to a calendar where they can register themselves for a stay.
WordPress.com also offers other features to help you build a hotel website, including contact forms (to retrieve pertinent guest details), social media sharing (to promote your hotel), and email subscriptions (to generate leads and offer discounts to loyal guests).
Spread the word to the world
In the competitive hotel marketplace, it’s not enough to stand by and wait for travelers to stumble upon your website. Be proactive about it:
- Post regular blog posts to excite tourists (source topics from local events).
- Feature suitable and mandatory pages — Find, Reserve, Contact, About Us, Meetings, and Events — in your navigation bar.
- Promote your hotel’s site on booking portals, such as Kayak.
- Register with local business listings to improve your site’s visibility.
- Keep tabs on your hotel’s online presence using the WordPress.com Stats page.
Now that you’re ready to build a first-class website, take a moment to consider whether to invest in site tools or to go the free route.
You might also like: How to Set Up a Booking Calendar with Amelia
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