The cost of an Internet presence

Remember, as I have said before, "Not all web sites are equal"

You can be on the Internet in different ways for different sums of money

• Get your teenage son to knock you out a web site on a bit of free web space
• this will not cost you anything, but unless the lad knows an awful lot about the Internet, it will not bring you many visitors - search engines do not index many sites from freeserve type locations, and you are unlikely to be getting many referrals from other web sites either. In short you will be lucky to get 1 or 2 visits a day to your web page, probably less.

• Put a page on another bigger site (Smooth Hound, Cornwall-Online, or masses of others that regularly send me mailouts).
• This will cost you comparatively little (around £100 to £200 per year) Depending on your location you will get from 1 to 5 people a day looking at your page, and will perhaps get 1 booking a month if you are lucky

• get your own web site with your own URL (i.e. an address like http://www.corisande.com  for our hotel, Corisande Manor)
• If you merely put it with a web site writer you will get the average number of visits that any hotel get, 5 to 10 a day,  leading to around 1 or 2 bookings a month. At this level it is still hardly worth your while looking at e-mails every day to check your post
• the cost will be anywhere from £500 to £5000 - paying more is not necessarily a sign that you will get more web site visitors, in fact if you have commissioned a multi-media site, you may pay a lot more and get a lot fewer visitors

• get you own web site like http://www.corisande.com and pay for the web writer to "maintain" it for you.
• this should not just be changing copy, but should encompass a regular re-submission of the site to search engines if necessary, a regular change of the coding to reflect changing search engine algorithms and a regular supply of statistics to you to enable you to see how you web site is faring
• the maintainer should also offer a series of referral sites that he controls that will send your hotel web site a regular and plentiful supply of visitors
• if it is working properly, after about 3 to 4 months from birth, your web site should be receiving around 40 or 50 visits a day, with perhaps 5 to 10 coming from search engines (depending on the popularity of your area and also on how well it fares on search engine data bases) and the rest coming from referrals

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