Gite website design and online marketing advice for gite and holiday cottage rentals owners

Gite Guru is the home of gite website designer Dave Smith.

I’m an expert in online marketing techniques (11 years in the industry, a true ‘veteran’!) and in particular, I know a lot about Wordpress websites, blogs, themes, plugins and SEO. Which means I get my clients to the top of search engines for the search terms that matter to their businesses.

I’ve been running this site / blog for a while now with the aim of helping property rental owners to market their properties more effectively online, and in doing so, picking up a bit of Wordpress design and development work along the way. 

Check out the site, and if you like what you ready, why not sign up for the newsletter or get in touch? (more…)

Given Sterling’s recent weakness against the Euro, holiday rental owners in the Eurozone have been increasingly keen this year to look to other Eurozone members for guests.

Increasingly I’ve been asked whether I can build multi-lingual websites, and whether I can source the translations for these sites.

The answer to both questions is “yes”.

It doesn’t need to cost a fortune, but adding foreign language pages to your website will make prospective guests feel more welcome from the outset, potentially save you from difficult telephone Q&A’s, and also help you to rank more highly in the local search results for those countries.

If you’re interested, check out the multi-lingual web design package I’ve put together and then get in touch!

Just launched my first Wordpress e-commerce website using a plugin appropriately named eShop. The site is for a London cafe and Roastery called Climpson & Son’s and features a brand new design for the brand along with a fully functioning shop and blog.

The eShop plugin is pretty straight forward to install and use, and works well for this type of (relatively) straight forward shop. It integrates easily with Paypal and is simple to customise to fit with the existing theme design through the css. (more…)

I’ve just put the finishing touches to a new website for a client who owns a beautiful Pigeonnier in Quercy Blanc in the south west of France. 

Website homepage for Vacationrentalfrance.net

The beautiful website features a header image slideshow, along with all the usual features you’d expect including image gallery, contact form, interactive guestbook, Google Map for directions, blog (the activities section, content still being populated) and Google Analytics for stats reporting. (more…)

Def: “A crippling fear of updating your website home page for fear of

adversely affecting your Google search ranking & traffic”.

Paranoid about making changes to your home page?

You built your website a couple of years back, you’ve spent time (possibly money) getting your Seach Engine Optimisation right, and you’re proud of your Google traffic and page rank. You know that the copy on your website is a key factor in your search engine ranking but you desperately want to give it an update or refresh… but you don’t dare. 

Are you suffering from Google Fear!? 

I’ve been there myself. (more…)

I used to have Fantastico, now I don’t. I’ve recently moved over to Mosso as my web host, and they don’t have the standard Cpanel functionality, let alone the one click install for Wordpress that Fantastico affords. Which has been… frustrating.

You see, I probably do at least one Wordpress install per week, either for a client, or for myself for my latest experiment in getting-rich-quick-that-never-works. (As an aside, for all you Wordpress developers out there (more…)

In my previous post on Wordpress SEO, I looked at how you can switch the relative importance in Google’s eyes of your blog name and description. In this post I’ll look at how we can change our page titles to make them more SEO friendly without messing up our website navigation. 

One of my (very few) frustrations with the Wordpress functionality is the page naming convention, and specifically that the page title HAS to form the navigation link in your main or sub-navigation. It’s frustrating because I know the importance of writing a strong page name in <h1> tags when creating a search optimised page. (more…)

with permission http://bit.ly/nw53o

You’ve found the property, bought it, negotiated your way through the complexities of a foreign legal system, you’ve mastered the local language, turned a run down shack into a rental dream and discovered your flair for interior design, all on a miserly budget. You’re the master of your own destiny, and you can do anything!

You’re ready for your first guests, so now it’s on to the website. Surely you can build your own website right!? (more…)

Victoriac over on Lay My Hat just posted a really interesting little tool for checking your website marketing called Website Grader. Stick in your URL (make sure you include / exclude the www according to how your site is presented in browsers), wait a minute or so and see a fairly comprehensive report on a variety of website marketing factors. 

I’m not convinced in the validity of their scoring mechanic (I get 91/100 at the moment which is surprisingly high given I’ve only been blogging for a year or so and I’ve only got a PR 1 so far) but it’s useful to sense check the factors that can influence traffic, page rank and search results. (more…)