If you feel like your tourism website could use a little more pep, and are thinking of rebuilding a website into a growth-driven design one, this list can help you prepare for what you can do ahead of time to save whoever you get to upgrade your website some extra time and headaches.
1. Fill out Tangible Words’ web content and design questionnaire.
Filling out this handy questionnaire will help guide the website process for anyone you choose for rebuilding a website of yours. The questionnaire will help focus your thoughts, and develop the goals for your new and improved website. Once these goals and thoughts are clear, you’ll be able to pick the firm that works best for you.
2. Gather testimonials from your most frequent tourists.
You’re bound to have some tourists who have completely fallen in love with your area. These tourists probably love to talk about your region to friends, so just ask them for a minute of their time to give you a quote about what makes your tourism area so special to them. Testimonials like this can save a lot of time for whoever ends up designing your website, so keep these quotes close and decide on your favourites early on so you don’t have to take up a website designer’s time later on.
3. Gather all relevant passwords (and any other security information that might be useful).
One of the silliest ways to lose time during the updating process for a website is the confusion caused by lost or hard-to-find passwords. It can save a website designer time if you gather all this information in one, easily searchable place. If your designer asks for your web passwords, you don’t want to be passing them napkins and gum wrappers scrawled with hard-to-read handwriting. Get everything together in a nice, tidy document and your upgrade team will thank you!
4. Make sure your budget can handle a complete website redesign.
Expect a good, inbound-marketing-certified, user-driven website can cost you a minimum of $25,000. It’s a necessary cost and will result in more interest in your region, which will translate to increased revenue, but it’s still not a one-time-meeting decision investment. You should have multiple meetings with any firm to make sure there is no variation between your expectations and their scope of work. When you are sure you can afford the investment before you begin the redesign process everyone can not only get to work faster on your project, you’ll avoid confusion and chaos later.
5. Collect your company logos and images in the same place.
Just like passwords, a website designer will need easy access to your company logos and other related images. Having all the photos you have paid for and collected over the years will be helpful, so a designer doesn’t have to go searching for the file or gathering new ones if they don’t have to. It’s also worth coming up with at least a basic design brief to follow, to make the redesign process streamlined.
6. Make a list of the best, most attractive aspects of your tourism region.
You’ve been doing this long enough that you should have a pretty good idea of what draws visitors to your tourism region but, if you don’t, you could always talk to the same visitors you interviewed for testimonials. Ask them what first drew them to your region, and what keeps them coming back. Compare their list with yours and then come up with a comprehensive list of the best qualities of your region. This list will help copywriters trained in inbound marketing figure out how to make your best qualities shine. You’ll probably have fun coming up with this list: it’s a nice way of remembering what you love about your region to begin with.
After all, it’s why you do what you do, and why you want a better website in the first place.
Want Help Streamlining Your Tourism Website Redesign Process?
