Web design in Torquay

The booking window opens long before the season

People plan summer in January and February. If the site is being rebuilt in April it has missed the decisions it needed to influence, and the traffic it gets in July is arriving after most of the choosing is done.

Practically: a site intended to earn in a given summer wants to be live and indexed by the end of winter. Search engines need time to see it, and so does anyone comparing three places to stay before booking one.

Two audiences who never meet

A Torquay business usually serves visitors and residents, and they want different things from the same website. The visitor needs to know what it is like, what it costs, and whether it is worth the trip. The resident already knows all that and wants opening hours and a phone number.

Trying to serve both with one home page usually produces something that looks like tourism marketing and irritates the locals who keep you going in February. Giving each a clear route in — and making the resident's route fast — is the fix, and it costs nothing structurally.

Photographs do more work here than anywhere else

Nobody books a room, a table or a day out in Torbay on the strength of a paragraph. They look, and they decide quickly, often on a phone in a bad signal.

This is the one place where I would tell a business to spend money on photography before spending it on anything else about the website. Real pictures of the actual rooms, the actual view and the actual food outperform any amount of copywriting, and stock imagery is spotted instantly by somebody who has already looked at ten similar places.

Getting up the hill

Torquay is built on hillsides, and a surprising number of practical customer questions are about that: where to park, how steep the walk is, whether there are steps, whether it is manageable with a pushchair or a bad knee.

Businesses that answer those questions plainly get fewer phone calls asking them and more bookings from people who would otherwise have hesitated. It is the least glamorous content on the site and often the most valuable.

Questions people here ask

When should I have a new site built?

Winter, if the season matters to your trade. Building in October or November means the site is live, indexed and settled well before people start planning their summer.

Do I need a booking system?

Not always. Plenty of Torbay businesses do better with a fast enquiry route and a phone number than with a booking engine they do not keep up to date. An out-of-date availability calendar loses more custom than not having one.

Is it worth having a page for Paignton and Brixham too?

Only if you genuinely trade there and can say something specific about it. A page that just swaps the town name is worse than no page — it is the exact thing Google demotes.