• Welcome to Gite Guru, the home of website designer Dave Smith.

    I specialise in SEO web design for owners of holiday rental properties, including gites, villas, B&Bs and hotels using Wordpress.

    I write articles here to help those in this sector to get more bookings. I also run a free French gite directory called Rent a Gite in France.

    Use the icons on the right to connect with me!

Practice what you preach…

You can’t launch a theme and not use it yourself… so I’ve just taken the plunge and switched to my own Photo Lover theme. I was a bit nervous as I’d done a fair few customisations to my previous theme, but to be honest it was pretty straight forward.

I’ve also done some tidying up of the welcome message, and will be making use of the widgetised areas of the Thematic framework over the coming days.

I’ve pretty much used the theme out of the box apart from making the sidebar link text slightly smaller, so this site now serves as a demo of what the theme looks like too.

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Photo Lover theme release

photo-lover-themeI’m a big lover of background photography on WordPress themes, (the theme on this site Aeros uses background images) so I decided to make my own, which I’m releasing today, called Photo Lover (demo here).

The Photo Lover WordPress theme is perfect for holiday rental websites,  but also for photographers, illustrators and I’m sure many other users.

It features a clever little function which allows the reader to hide the content on the page to see the image below in it’s (near) entirety and displays the page content on a semi transparency. Read More »

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Monitor your search rankings with KPMRS

Crap name, useful (free) tool. These guys approached me a few months ago about promoting their search engine rank monitoring tool to my readers, so I’ve been checking them out before blogging about them.

Why wait 3 months? Because these tools are notorious for popping up and then disappearing again within a matter of weeks. This one has stayed the distance, and is actually pretty cool in that it allows you for free to monitor your site’s rank for specific search phrases across the three main search engines and for different countries (I’m monitoring UK and US), and displays it in a nice little table. Read More »

Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Leave a comment

Translation plugin for WordPress

I’m a big believer in catering for foreign language visitors to holiday rental websites. Inevitably most of my client’s guests come from another country, and mostly speak a different language. Whilst many do understand english to an advanced level, those who don’t could be missed bookings.

With that in mind, I wrote on here about a clever little multi-lingual plugin I’ve been using on client sites a while back, but since installing it on a few sites I’ve encountered the WordPress developers nightmare… the White Screen Of Death. Read More »

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Photo lover theme is sponsored by Ferienwohnungen Normandie and designed by Normandy Gites