Lull-Abi Inn - Motel Operation

This was an interesting project to undertake, not particularly challenging on the surface it seemed, but the end product makes good use of the power of Wordpress with its wide range of 3rd party plugins.

This project came to life at a restaurant on New Years Eve 2011. A friend and local motel owner joined my wife and I for a drink at the bar and we began chatting about his website, which he was in the process of overhauling. His existing design was very outdated and did not deliver any effective ways of communication between the site owner and its visitors. He'd received a design quote from his existing host company which I understand was in the $3000 range, plus an additional $500 for a new logo design. It amazes me how much people are still charging for basic Wordpress projects in 2012. Sure, 7, maybe 8 years ago, it would have cost in that region to deliver a clean design with some social media and visitor interaction tools, but in 2012, with products like Wordpress and Joomla around, $3000 seems pretty steep.

As the project unfolded the website owner became more motivated and excited by the possibilities available via Wordpress, possibilities of communicating with visitors which he hadn't understood existed.

The template was created using Artisteer. It's a solid enough platform for Wordpress and Joomla template creation and gives a broad range of design options with the ability to switch ideas in and out quickly. The new logo design was put together quickly (by myself) and the site owner was extremely pleased with the end result, and the fact that the price he paid was $50 and not $500! I took the top graphic picture of his location with a digital camera on a rather nice day in mid January, not the best of header images but easy enough to switch out at some point in the future.

The criteria for the project :

• Clean graphics
• To sell rooms effectively
• To reduce incoming phone calls and increase online motel room bookings
• To promote the unique selling proposition of the motel being 'great value' and in a 'great location'.
  
• To provide quick and easy communication with the visitor

The site was kept quite clean graphically, using a full width image header along with small room images which could be expanded on from within the image gallery.

The 'view rooms' graphic was raised above the fold on the home page and featured a room image which complimented the site color scheme. The 'great value' concept was captured within the above-fold body text and the header image and first room image provided the appropriate 'feel' for the property - clearly not a high-end hotel location, yet bright, clean and respectable, in the mid-range motel market.

A new booking widget was created and features in the same prominent position at the top of most of the pages.

The communication element became quite challenging and interesting. The owner wanted the capacity to post to the website quickly and easily from a smartphone and to have the post distributed to Facebook and Twitter and for it to appear on specific sections of the site based upon categories. For example, a blog post made into the 'home page' category should appear in the blog section but also in a spot on the home page. Likewise, a blog post made into the specials category should appear in the blog but also at the top of the 'specials' page, which is a static page. The 'List Category Posts' plugin allows you to list posts from a category into a post/page using simple shortcode. This shortcode accepts a category name or id, the order in which you want the posts to display, and the number of posts to display. You can use [catlist] as many times as needed with different arguments. List Category Posts' plugin

The Facebook/Twitter and other social media posting was accomplished by one of the many available plugins for achieving SM distribution.

A Smartphone App was located and installed allowing easy posting from an Android phone, directly onto specified blog categories, allowing images and other media types to be utilized from the phone.

An email marketing component was installed within Wordpress, offering auto-responders and a wide range of email list management features.

A 'Guide' section was created allowing the owner to build a database of local business reviews on the site. This is a great way to accomplish SEO, by having post text targeting a broader range of searches pertaining to local businesses, which can yield relevant traffic for the motel. The WPMU DEV SEO plugin was used for managing SEO meta tags etc. A Google analytics plugin was installed alongside an automatic sitemap generator, hooked up to a Google Webmaster Tools account for the specific site.

An FAQ builder plugin was utilized to provide information to the visitor and to have an easy facility for users to interact with the site, getting obvious questions answered quickly and having the facility to ask new questions through the site easily. Using an FAQ builder is another way to get content onto the site for SEO purposes and for improving the user experience at the site.

A 'RoutePlanner' plugin was installed allowing users to generate a roadmap / directions to the motel from any location in the USA, without having to leave the website. Many people send users out to Mapquest or Google Maps, then lose a percentage of those visitors who get distracted and never return.

This was a successful project and provides a great platform for a website owner to communicate with his/her visitors without the need for any technical ability. The technology on the website collects a simple incoming post from a cellphone and distributes the post to a blog, into a specific section of a web page, to Facebook, Twitter, Digg and almost 50 other social bookmarking websites. $3500 ? - the whole project was completed in 2 weeks for less than $1000.

CH