There are a lot of tools and resources out there to help you with your web site.  First is your friends or your customers.  Ask them to look at your web site and give you an honest opinion on how easy is it to navigate, find your phone number or and find your email address.  Does your site talk about you? What are you an expert in? Why should your customer book through you?  Have them tell you why they didn’t book with you.  Second is recourses on the internet…Feedback Roulette  is an easy and fun way to exchange feedback about websites. You review others’ websites and they review yours.

What makes Feedback Roulette unique?

1. It Endorses Quality Feedback: The system of ratings encourages participants to give quality feedback, so that they get useful feedback themselves.
2. Reviews are Anonymous: Since all the reviews on Feedback Roulette are anonymous, people can express themselves freely and be honest in their opinion. This also has a positive impact on feedback quality.
3. You Get Feedback from Peer Experts: Most users of Feedback Roulette are webmasters, designers, internet marketers and other people involved with Web.
4. It’s Guaranteed: You are guaranteed to receive feedback and you control the quantity of reviews you receive.
5. It’s Free: Feedback Roulette is free to use.
6. It’s Easy: Anyone can use Feedback Roulette. No special skills required. You can get started in a matter of seconds.
7. It’s Fun: You review others’ websites and receive Feedback Points for your reviews.

Have you used Feedback Roulette? Let us know your thoughts!

According to tnooz, the study (of nearly 2,800 US travel buyers in the US) found that 57% will only wait three seconds before abandoning a site if it has failed to load properly.  TravelPulse cites that Sixty-five percent of 18 to 24 year olds expect a site to load in two seconds or less. A third of travelers would be less likely to visit a site after experiencing technical problems like slowness or errors on the page.

Making your website easy to navigate and quick to load is absolutely essential to retain your customers.  Here are a few quick tips on how to ensure your NexCite runs up to speed:

• Make sure you are using less than 20MB of space within your Images and Files storage inside your NexCite admin
• Only use one slide show per page on your NexCite
• Make sure your banner image is less than 50KB
• Don’t litter your pages with flashing 3rd party ads (one of the biggest culprits for increasing page load time)
• Create pages with your customer in mind and don’t make them think.  Direct call to actions and logical navigation will allow them an easy shopping experience, one that leads to more booking.

NexCite is designed to run light and fast.  Follow these tips and you won’t need to worry about your customers abandoning your website.  As always, we are here to help.  Get in touch with our Support Team if you would like any other suggestions on how to keep your site optimized for the travel consumer.

Since the home page is valued so highly, it also tends to be the page that is most easily destroyed.   Many times the home page turns into a catch all for supplier brand logos, miscellaneous ad style banners, and random phrases hinting at something but never fully explained. 

Do you ever find yourself saying “This button is important, but I don’t really have any place to put it… so I guess I’ll just put it on the home page.”?  That is a slippery slope and one that leads to homepages that look like this:

Without a clean, concise homepage, your customer will be confused by what to do next and you may lose them before they even have time to discover what your business is all about.  It’s time to stop hoarding on your home page and give it the make-over it deserves.

4 Key Concepts for a Clutter-Free Homepage

Answer the question: Why do people want to book travel through you?

• What’s the benefit in using YOUR agency over another?
• Most people have become accustomed to booking their own vacations, take some time to explain exactly what the consumers receives when the book through a travel agent.

Get Personal

• People want to connect and build relationships, give them a little personal flavor so they can accomplish that.  A quick sentence about why you’re in the travel industry or how the agency got started works well.
• If you don’t want your website to show your personality, add links to your social media accounts (like facebook and twitter) so that your customers can get their fun, personal fix from your company there.

Call to Action

• Don’t make your customer think.  Tell them what they need to do.  
• Use call to actions like “Book your Vacation Now! Call for the best rates! Plan your next trip!  Search our Vacation Offers!”
• Make sure your call to action appears on the first screen, above the fold.

Establish and Reinforce your Expertise

• Add a customer testimonial, credentials, years in business, etc.
• People want to know they are buying from a trusted expert.

Need an example?  Take a look at these homepages for inspiration:

If you need a refresher on how to edit pages and make changes to your website, take one of our weekly NexCite Orientation webinars.   As always, feel free to contact us in the support department if you need any help.

My thought is: all of the above. Give your clients multiple ways to interact with you, and multiple ways to buy. As Scott mentions, you need to prominently display your contact information throughout you website. Let them pick up the phone and give you a call any time during their website experience. Let them send you an email, perhaps including a travel offer of interest in the email they send to you. And yes, let them book online if they know exactly what they want. Or better yet, let them start the online booking process and perhaps let one of your agents finish it for you (stay tuned for some new technology coming from us in the near future in this area).

Every consumer is different. But traditional travel agents have an advantage the large OTAs will probably never match. You have a personal level of customer service they can’t match.

I’ve had the pleasure of participating in several Travel Weekly Leadership Forums over the last year or so, and have heard Scott speak multiple times. If you ever have a chance to hear Scott speak, I highly recommend it. Not only is he a really interesting speaker, his subject matter tends to be focused on what is going to happen in the future with technology, of which we all need to be aware. He always has new and thought-provoking information (my current favorite is augmented reality – something my 15 year old son specialized in, but in a different way than Scott discusses). His data can be a little overwhelming to digest, but I always try and remind myself that not everything happens at once. I’m also a big believer in crawl-walk-run strategies. Bite off a bit at a time, make sure you execute properly at each step, and eventually you’ll get the whole picture.

Scott discussed his top 10 items you need to pay attention to when designing a website. I won’t repeat them all here, but you can find a summary at Travel Weekly. One of the things Scott mentioned is that you should always keep up-to-date with the latest design principles. But how do you keep up, and how often do design principles change? One simple idea here is to look at the websites of the largest companies both in the industry an in other industries. They have the big bucks to do focus groups, market studies, etc. You’ll see some commonalities that you can take advantage of yourself. Think about the automobile for instance. Over the years, several usability standards have emerged across all cars and manufacturers. Things like the turn signal lever is located on the steering column, where the radio is, gas pedal on the right – break on the left, etc. So that you don’t have to read a manual every time you buy or rent a new car. It’s very similar with websites – main tabs across the top or left side, etc. Consumers will probably be more comfortable navigating your website if it is familiar to what they are used to on the web. And yet you can still differentiate yourself and add you own level of customization using Scott’s techniques – thinks as simple as describing your unique specialty and capabilities prominently on the front page, above ‘the fold’.

Even the big guys change their site design strategies over time, and what was once proven to be consumer-friendly, may change. A great example is Travelocity, who in 1994 announced a major website redesign — and then earlier this year announced another. It’s interesting to read both these releases and see how some things changed, and some stayed the same. If you can remember the 1994 website (with the distinct sections of different colored backgrounds) which website do you like better – the 1994 version or the 2009 version?

One of my favorite parts is Chapter 3: Billboard Design 101: Designing pages for scanning, not reading. All of us (myself included!) are guilty of putting to much of the wrong kind of information on a page. Typically we assume that everyone looking at our site will want to read every single detail of what we have to say, however this isn’t necessarily correct. What really happens when someone looks at our site is they first scan over things to see if it matches what they are looking for in some way.  Scanning things is difficult when there is noise floating around the information.  In most cases your visitors are trying to find the piece of information that they were originally looking for and things like excessive logos, flashing graphics, even text that isn’t of interest to what the visitor is primarily interested in are all distractions.

This leads to an interesting point that your site should have one topic per page.  As an added bonus, this can also help with rankings in search engines, as the entire page is devoted to one topic only. You can see a good example of this on my demo site, under the “Vacation Reviews” area.  The first page explains why there are reviews, which reviews are available and how to submit your own review.  Each of the individual pages focuses on just one topic, the destination and/or resort being reviewed. Take the Moorea review for example; this could have been one review about my entire trip to Tahiti and Moorea, however it makes more sense split out as two separate reviews that link to each other, that way visitors who are only interested in Moorea don’t need to read about information for Tahiti.

Some ways to make it easier for users to “scan” your site:

• Know the typical information that visitors are interested in and make that information easy to find from ANY page.
• Provide a FAQ page – most visitors will probably have the same set of very similar questions (what are typical fuel surcharge costs, how much liquid can I take on an airplane, where do I apply for a passport, what do hotel star ratings mean?
• Organize information in a way that makes sense.  Group information relating to Cruises under your main Cruises tab, group information relating to your agency under your About Us tab.

There are many ways to make sites friendly for users to “scan”.  If you’ve seen an interesting technique on another site, or have a unique way you make your own site “scan” friendly, leave a comment!