Internet Advertising/Web presence

[Mark]

I'm in the process of developing a (very basic!) website advertising my B&B business.  The business is many months from getting off the ground, but I thought I'd get as much of the prep done as possible beforehand.  I was wondering whether anyone in the know could offer advice on the best ISP to use in France, costs associated specifically with getting the website up live, which suffix to use (.fr, .uk, .com, .eu) etc....

Thanks, Mark

  

[Lachouette]

Someone has to be first to reply.........................and I know there'll be many more 'techie' and learned replies than mine.

I've found it's been really useful to have a French based URL name, as it's easy to tell the French what your website/email address is if it's in French, and have to spell it out for non-French speakers than it might be the other way around.  The last people to own our place named it after an English race track, with website to match, and I would hate to have to tell French callers that!

For what it's worth, we're with tiscali (now Alice) and have a 10 euro a month abonnement,which gives us unlimited time for 6 days a week from 5am - 5pm on dial-up and an additional 15 hours at other times on top.  I'm currently re-doing our website so have yet to test the connection for uploading the new site but guess it might be terribley slow!

Jan

[Cassis]

For hosting your website do not use your ISP's free webspace.  For one thing, you can't choose your preferred domain name, and for another, if you change ISPs you have to ship your website off to another address and you lose any visibility you may have made. 

I've changed ISP twice in 3 years to try and find a decent one - so far Free has proved miles better than Club Internet and cheaper than Wanadoo, now Orange.

You can host your site on a UK based server if you like - easier to understand the terms and sort out any glitches and technical queries.  I use Sreamline, domain name and hosting came to about 30 quid for 2 years and the site has only ever been down once, for a period of 5 hours, in the last year.

Your choice of site name is probably more influential where the search engines are concerned than the suffix.  Or were you wondering whether viewers might be deterred by certain suffixes?  If the latter, I doubt it - I would think the content is more likely to attract or put people off than the suffix.

[Coco]

My website address is vacances-normandes.co.uk which, after I chose it, I realised turned out to be a real pain because every time I gave it to UK guests I had to exlain that there was an S on the en of vacance and an ES on the end of normand.  However, when we moved here I thought about getting an .fr suffix (don't know why!) but when I looked into it I seem to remember that you had to be able to justify your choice of website name, ie egg.com would have a problem because eggs don't relate to money - I suppose I would have been OK because I am offering holidays in Normandy.  However, I decided to stick with my .co.uk suffix.  As Cassis has said, more important, is the name of your website - and now I certainly don't have a problem with spelling it out to French people.   I host with Freeola and like Cassis, pay less than £30 per tw years for the name and nothing for the hosting.  The only downside is I have to use the freeola connection to upload stuff to my webspace, which means paying for a connection to a UK number but as long as I get it all ready beforehand it's no great expense.

I haven't checked recently but one deciding factor for us as to whether to change or not was that the French ISPs seem to charge a lot more than the UK ones.

[Quillan]

I’ll start answering the original post by saying different people have different ideas and ways of doing things and that what I am about to say worked for me and I have used the same techniques on many ‘blue chip’ corporate websites.

You are very wise to start your website now, I would go further and say that you really want it up and running within at least three months of you starting your B&B so really you need to have the whole project carefully planned. By this I mean you need to have your opening date set in stone and know enough to build in delays etc to your project. I will explain why you need to have your website up and running quickly a bit further down.

There is lots of good software out there to help you build a website, some of it free but the better ones you tend to pay for. Having said that you should not rush out and buy a full blown version of Dreamweaver because it will take you a minimum of 6 weeks training to learn how to use it properly and it costs a fortune. Many people use either free software or things like MS Word for which you can download templates from Microsoft to help you create a website.

The first step is to find somewhere to host you website. Others here have already mentioned that you would be unwise to use your current ISP (like wanadoo, free etc) because you can’t have your chosen website name in the URL. I would suggest you look around the web by using a search engine to find a reasonable priced company. Where the actual servers reside geographically (England, France, USA, etc) is of little or no interest as we are talking World Wide Web. If you have MS FrontPage and are using it to design your website you need to choose a hosting company that supports Front Page Extensions as many of its features will not work without them.

You now have to pick a name, you can have the name of your property, a descriptive name etc. What you really need is something simple and easy to pronounce and again as has been said sounds like it spells. As to the ‘dot’ part there are issues that you should be aware of, I won’t go in to details but its suffice to say that unless you are registered as a proper business in France  you can’t get a .fr name and there are similar restrictions to a .eu name. It is much easier to use a .com or a .co.uk name, the problem with the latter is that it is really a UK name when you are in France so a .com is probably the best way to go.

Once you have found somewhere to host your website, chosen a name and created your website you need to know how to catch the search engines eye. This is probably the most difficult part and often the most overlooked. There is no point in having the best website in the world if know body can find it or knows it exists. Search engines will take a long time to find your website and start giving it a ranking so this is why you should get it up and running around 3 months prior to you opening.

You will need to understand about keywords, meta tags and how search engines rank websites. In the old days it was simple, they just looked at the keywords but now it is far more complicated. Because of the fierce competition between the top search engines each has created it’s own algorithm to rank a website and it’s keeps it secret.

You are probably getting a bit worried now but there is a simple rule you can apply which is your website keywords should be included in your in the first page of your website (referred to as the index.htm page) and if you can in the ‘title’ of your website, here is a crude example.

Text on index.htm.

Freds B&B, a beautiful quiet Bed and Breakfast located near Paris within 20 minutes of Charles DeGaul airport and 2 minutes walk from the nearest metro station.

Keyword Metatag.

Bed and Breakfast, B&B, Paris, Charles DeGaul, Airport, Metro

Website Title.

Freds Bed and Breakfast (B&B), Paris

There is a lot more information you need to tell search engines, like how often to check your website for changes etc. This type of information is not displayed as text but hidden in what again is called metatags.

To work out what keywords you need you should sit down and think what you would type in to find a B&B in the area you are setting yours up in. There is a cheat you can do. Microsoft Explorer does have an edit function that downloads a website and allows you to edit it (you can’t of course save it back because you won’t know the user name and password).

If you happen to have a good editor like FrontPage you can download the website and look at the Keywords the author has used. So all you need to do is work out a few different ways of searching for a B&B in your area. One B&B will stick out because it will either always be first every time or within the top three. Use the editor to look at the page and cut and past the keywords in to your own website. Very cheeky but then it’s no more than a lot of ‘professional’ web designers do.

Another tip is to use wrongly spelt words as well. There are names of towns etc or words that people constantly spell wrong. If you can identify them and they relate you’re your B&B and the area you live then add them to the keywords.

One thing you should also be aware of is that you MUST always be within the first four pages of any search engine. It is a known fact that most people will not progress past the fourth page of delivered results from a search engine, they get bored. The best ‘ranking’ does not always mean you come first in any search results.

I personally use an expensive and powerful website analyzer that tells you exactly how to change your website to give it the best chance of getting near the top but then I got it when I worked for a living and at the time cost me nothing but it’s very good.

The last thing I will say is that a good(ish) website can bring you in a lot of business, ours brings in the most percentage wise compared to other places we advertise. So it’s worth spending a bit of time and effort and if you don’t understand how to set a website up properly there are loads of good companies out there who will do it all for you at a price. To find out who is good do your search’s like before and look at the bottom of the page of the top 10 websites. You will often find who created them and if you like what you see then approach them (you usually can click on the bit that says “Website Designed by Fred Bloggs and Co”. If you go this route you want to ensure that they will supply some basic software and show you how to make minor changes to your website so you can for instance change the prices without having to contact them (or pay them of course).

Hope this helps and as I have said it works for me.

[Cassis]

And he didn't even mention link building, page load times, page sizes, browser compatibility - shame on you, Quillan!  Or were you worried about information overload? [:)]

Quillan mentioned Microsoft Explorer and downloading a website to mess about with on your computer at leisure.  If in Internet Explorer you click File and Edit this opens the webpage in Notepad (bloc-notes).  You can then save it on your computer and mess about with it, copy and paste bits of code, etc.  "Borrowing" source code seems fair game but not body text and images without permission.

If you use Firefox/Netscape based browsers you can similarly view and save the source code of any website page by clicking View in the toolbar and Page Source.  This opens the page's source code in a new window.  You can save it on your computer if you want.  It is better than Internet Explorer for this because it automatically colour codes different types of tag and content and generally lays it out nice and cleanly.

It's worthwhile downloading at least Mozilla Firefox or Netscape as well as Internet Explorer to make sure that your pages display well in the major browser types.  IE allows all sorts of 'bad' html code to display properly but other browsers don't always do the same.

One advantage of hosting on a UK or US based server rather than a French one is that you can deal with the provider in English.  As Quillan says, it is the World Wide Web so use whatever host gives what you think is the best deal and is most convenient for you.

[Quillan]

Cassis is right about download times etc, you need to keep pictures at around 45kb in size to take in to account that there are still many people with modems. Most of the decent web design software will give an estimated download time based on a modem connect which is worse case for any page that is currently being edited. I would not worry about browsers as the market you are aiming at will, well around 85%+, have IE. If you use FrontPage you can set autosize to get over the problem of people using different resolution screen sizes.

IE will use many different pices of software to edit a webpage, by default it will use MS Word but this will change if you have or you install FrontPage. Nobody will try and 'do' you for the stuff which can't been seen like keywords but a Casis says the contents is another matter.

If you are looking to buy a web design package and you are a bit of a beginner then I would recommend FrontPage. Don't get me wrong I am no fan of Billy boy but FrontPage is very easy to use if you have mainly MS products on your desktop. I have a copy of Dreamweave MX (I think thats what it's called) and I can't get on with it at all but then I'm no website designer but I've implemented quite a few websites and servers in my time.

[Cassis]

[quote user="Quillan"]

Cassis is right about download times etc, you need to keep pictures at around 45kb in size to take in to account that there are still many people with modems.

[/quote]

And if you have more than one picture on the page, make them even smaller.  Your overall page size is what counts - about 60kb overall is an oft-quoted max (my index page is actually 65kb, theoretically a bit fat).  60kb should load in about 12secs on a 56k modem.   If for some reason your web design software doesn't give you page load times, here's a site that does it for you.  But your page has to be online already.  You can always add up the file sizes for all the items on the page (incl. the html) manually.

Page Load Time Test

[bigjimbishop]

I used www.ixwebhosting.com

3 euro per month and 10Gb storage.

Great online website builder for beginners like me and 2 domain names included.

Great support service too.

[Cerise]

Of course, alternatively, you could always be like me (SORRY Quillan and all other techies[:)])  pay someone else to do all the difficult bit of building website and sorting out keywords etc.  Just chose the name yourself, I've  got .net which doesn't therefore indicate a country, find places to advertise it and get on with sorting out the rest of the B & B business.

Realise this is a bit controversial for all you guys who like spending your lives in front of computers but frankly unless you love doing it - and I hate computers - and you are also good at it, which I'm not, your website could well be one of the things you can leave to someone else!  Works for me, anyway.

[Quillan]

[quote user="Cerise"]

Of course, alternatively, you could always be like me (SORRY Quillan and all other techies[:)])  pay someone else to do all the difficult bit of building website and sorting out keywords etc. 

[/quote]

Don't be sorry, thats a very good idea. If you don't know what you are doing you are much better off getting somebody to design and implement your website. As I said my experience is in implementing, thats getting it registered, working out the keywords and registering it with search engines and if you have money, like big corporates, it's very quick to do. Designing is a different matter and you really have to have a bit of an artistic touch.

So this now begs the question how do I get somebody to design a website for me and how do I find them? Well I am sure that there are a few in our forum, I don't know what they are like as I have no experience of their work but again there are a few rules you can apply. Being a registered company and also registered for VAT is one important thing. By being registered it means they take things seriously (we would like to think) because the cowboys tend not to be. Believe me there are a lot of 'one man bands' in France and the UK who see a person starting a B&B as a bit of a money tree and fair game.

The biggest problem is finding an organisation where you can go to and find a list of approved designers because there are hundreds of such organisations and a fair few of them of them charge a person to register their company with them and give a bit of code for them to put on their website to say they are approved with no check on either the company or the quality of work The only thing I can suggest is that you search for something like 'Approved Website Designers'  now look at their portfolio of clients especially for anything to do with local or national government or household company names. It's quite hard to get this sort of work and a lot of checks are normally done so they should in theory be OK. I found a few of these and the price quoted for a 5 page website was around £500 which included everthing other than actual search engine submitions and hosting, although there were a few few that offered this as well.

One thing to think about is how good are they at optimising websites for search engines, well the answer is easy, look at the names on the first page of your search because thats where you want to be.

You can also ask what design software they use and are their staff certified to use that software. Most decent companies will invest in their staff and ensure they are fully trained and hold current certification which does not always come cheap so this in turn shows that you are dealing with a good company. Quanity of employees is not always an indication of quality either as their are many registered and certified small one or two men companies out there producing excellent work to corportate companies and alike and many are subcontracted to by large IT consultancy companies.

Don't forget to ensure you website is copyrighted, a good design company will deal with this for you.

And no I don't design websites it took me 2 months to do mine myself and never again. I only did it because I had nothing to do at the time and was interested in learning.

[Quillan]

[quote user="bigjimbishop"]I used www.ixwebhosting.com
3 euro per month and 10Gb storage.
Great online website builder for beginners like me and 2 domain names included.
Great support service too.

[/quote]

I had a look at this and it seems quite good value considering you have to normally pay every two years to keep your domain name so to get it free for as long as they host your website is very good as is the monthly price. The price of hosting seems to be droping all the time these days but this is the cheapest I have seen so far.

[Coco]

I get free hosting with freeola.com and I've never yet found my website to be down because the ISP is.  Last time I paid for my name was last year and I paid £29.99 for two years.  As I said, the only downside to Freeola is that you can only upload to your website using their connection, which is a UK phone number, so I have to pay international rates whilst uploading.  But I think that's a small price to pay, especially as phone charges keep coming down!

My rankings aren't very high (I think) but that's down to my lack of technical ability (or interest... bit like Cerise, prefer to get on with the running of the B&B rather than throwing things at the computer out of frustration!) and if anyone looks at my website I think there are currently a couple of broken links that I really must get round to sorting.... tomorrow!  I built the site myself, using Frontpage (so it must be easy) and although I have no hitech wizzy, flashing, dinging bits on it, I have had a lot of compliments from people who have stayed here.  I think basically, people just want to know where you are, what you charge and what the rooms look like.

[Apero]

Recommend www.godaddy.com     .eu is the next big thing,  many eu companies are buying up,  also buy a domain that searchers may spell wrong, as said previously above, and point it to yours.

[Mark]

Well thank you all for what I'm sure is going to prove to be invaluable advice.  I bought Frontpage a while ago in anticipation (although shamefully I think the box may still be shrink-wrapped!),  so I'll try to get to grips with it in order to heed Quillan's 'three-month-before-going-live' web presence advice.  I have no particular interest in or aptitude for anything IT-related, but the fact that simplicity of content and presentation seems to be the key is encouraging.  The tips for enhancing one's search engine rating seemed fairly straightforward too.

Thanks again all.  I'm really grateful.  [:)]

[mascamps.com]

I think 3 months is very limited. It can easily take 6 months or more before google properly recognises your domain name so pick a name, put a very simple page up and submit it to google asap. That way, when your proper site is ready, it will appear in searches quite quickly. It's also worthwhile getting your site listed everywhere else as soon as you can (see coming PM).

I would go with .com personally as everyone just assumes that so if someone is guessing they'll normally start with that. Having said that, I'm about to start experimenting with www.chambres-dhotes.co.uk to see if it makes much of a difference in hits.

Also, host your site in the UK or at least Europe if at all possible (not all UK hosts will accept a non-UK address). The location of the hosting is used by google etc. to rank your page so if your main customer base is from the UK, host it there if you can. This is more expensive than hosting in America for comparable facilities (about 2 or 3 times more usually) but the business gained will more than make up for that.

Much as it may seem like a good idea to pay someone to do your site, I personally think you'd be better doing it yourself. That way you'll be able to add little changes without running up a bill and keep the site fresh. Buying a cheapo site isn't generally worth doing - some of the £99 sites I've seen lack items required to get your site indexed by the search engines.

 

Arnold