Running a Gite in Brittany

Free web advertising for gites

Added our three existing gites to a free website advertising gites.

Cerise, Pomme and Poire

|   11:07:24 PM   Free web advertising for gites   

Website woes

As regular readers may remember I bought a new website about 4 months ago, partly out of vanity and partly, for superfluous reasons, it was easier to spell, fit on printed paperwork, and dictate on the phone etc. Well the old website, www.brittany-holiday-gites.com had been on the first page of Google for about 2 years, but since the change the new website, www.brittanygites.com, has languished down at page 5 or 6 and dropping fast for the same search terms. It's currently on page 12. The redirect was meant to be seamless and just transfer visitors and search engines to the new site without a loss in rankings and hits. It wasn't to be.

This is a bit of a disaster. We get nearly all our gite business through the website, and our booking calendar reflects the problem. Last year we already had quite a few bookings for the following Summer and a fair amount of out-of-season bookings. This year, nothing. It's serious. We do have some printed advertising in Chez Nous, here, but the brochure doesn't come out until November.

As a test, about 3 weeks ago, I removed the redirect from the old site to the new site and placed a single page with some basic information about the gites on the old site. Suddenly the old site pops back to the top of Google and stays there, with the new site still plummeting like a stone.

The up shot of all this is Caroline and I have been writing a new website for the last week to replace the single page on the old site. We needed new words and pictures to avoid being penalised by Google for duplicate content, and anyway, we needed to add the two new gites. As part of the exercise I decided to learn CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, to jazz up the presentation and make future changes easier. CSS hasn't been easy, especially with so many different web browsers providing varying levels of support for the language. It's been harder than I expected, but a nice intellectual challenge. The new version of the old site http://www.brittany-holiday-gites.com has been published and fingers crossed Google will continue to like the content.

With the distraction of the website design work, things have been going a little slowly on the gite renovation, and my friend Ian who helps out alot, has been on holiday for a couple of weeks. It's hard to motivate yourself when working on a large project on your own everyday. It's easy to find excuses to get another coffee, or finish a bit early etc. Hopefully with the website redesign out of the way and Ian coming back things should start to move along a bit faster.

|   12:19:35 AM   Website woes