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As a villa or self catering accommodation owner, you will appreciate how competitive the rental market is and the necessity for your property to stand out when a customer is browsing for their holiday accommodation. Our web sites provide a real competitive advantage in your market by simply reaching more potential customers and offering them the best and easiest browsing experience.

Outstanding design and market leading technology combine to give you a competitive advantage in your market with the following key features:

• Our technologically advanced sites are simply more effective than your competitors, reaching more customers and converting more enquiries to bookings
• Choice of templates and colours. You can customise the colourings to suit your preference.
• All inclusive package includes choice of domain, email (with web mail facilities), hosting and the ability to request modification of pictures and text at any time
• Many advanced facilities such as a real time: availability calendar, on-line booking, automated secure credit card deposit collection, instant intelligent quotes, offers, downloadable brochure, accommodation layout with click thru to room information etc.
• Instant notification of bookings via email and SMS text messages
• Generate professional response emails (including payment requests) through your owner's control area to email enquiries
• Increase your web site traffic with our proven marketing advice pack
• Track your web site performance through comprehensive weekly comprehensive on-line site statistics
• We also guarantee to produce your web within one week and offer easy payment terms. No hidden costs, everything featured on this web site is included in our price.
• Complies with web standards and disability requirements ensuring your site is accessible and usable to as many customers as possible.
• Comprehensive site navigation facilities including an advanced text search facility and dynamic site map ensure your customers can find their way around your site with ease
• Comprehensive pricing options for your property, pool etc. including unlimited currencies, tax, discounts, surcharges etc
• Visitor site controls allow the customer to tailor their browsing experience, e.g. broad band v's dial-up, currency selection, weekly v's daily pricing etc.
• Dynamically control many of the key features of your web site (e.g. pricing/offers/availability etc.) instantly through your on-line owner's control area
• Most pages have a range of options which enable you to tailor a site to your specific requirements
• Guaranteed 99.9% web site availability through industry leading hosting

Please view our sample sites (by clicking on the images above) to see these features in action.

Consider the following statements:

• 66% of those looking for self catering accommodation would use the internet (Private Villas Magazine Research)
• 74% of Americans and 54% of Europeans logged on to the internet in the last 30 days (Ipsos-Reid)
• Europe is experiencing year-over-year gains and is poised to become the leader of the next Internet generation where the market promises to be as, if not more important than America's (Ipsos-Reid)
• The global Internet population is growing and is currently over a billion adults (Ipsos-Reid)

Simply put, for European self catering accommodation owners your market is on-line and increasing according to Ipsos-Reid (the most authoritative report on global web usage) in their annual Face of the Web report.

Our sites are simply more effective than your competitors, reaching more customers and converting more enquiries to bookings. The presentation and features of our award winning web sites for self catering accommodation and chalet owners are often cited as one of the major reasons why a customer books their accommodation over the competition.

Many of your fellow holiday home owners are already aware of the benefits of a web presence to the success of their business but very few of them of them are aware of the extent to which a well meaning but poorly designed web presence is damaging their business. In essence you spend your advertising budget (in magazines and web sites etc) channeling potential customers through a small screen space. On the web you get a few seconds to make an impression. When the first impression isn't good you don't get a second chance because the potential guest will never return.

The vast majority of property web sites are unwittingly badly designed often leading to the customer feeling overwhelmed and not clearly understanding their options ... you will rarely hear from them ... they will just leave the site and turn to places that feel more welcoming. Imagine how disorientating it would be to walk in to a store and not be able to tell immediately what services or goods were available there. The same is true of your web site, it must communicate in one short glance where users are, what your company does and what users can do at your site. If your site misses the mark here it's nearly impossible to recover.

Average sites typically score well below 50% against a usability compliance rate test designed by Neilson "the guru of Web page usability" (The New York Times). In contrast, our web design follows best practice 'web usability guidelines' practiced by the most successful companies in the world scoring over an impressive 90% on the same test. For example our home page design is compliant with hundreds of researched design concepts proven to ensure your site is instantly accessible to your customers. Some simple examples of why our sites are so usable compared to average sites:

• Research shows that over half of all users are 'search' dominant rather than 'link dominant'. In other words if you don't have a search good search facility on your site they will not browse your site. Our sites have your own unique search facilities placed prominently on each page.
• Research has shown that fast loading sites achieve proportionally more traffic than slow loading sites. In other words if your site's too slow your customer's will leave. While our sites are designed to be fast loading they also offer your customers a choice between optimizing for dial up or broadband speeds.
• 14% of users have some form of disability (e.g. color blindness, poor sight or inability to use a mouse device). That is a large percentage of users to ignore if your site is not designed to cater for their needs. Our sites are designed from the ground up to offer accessibility to users with disabilities including: text only versions of every page (commonly only found on large sites such as bbc.co.uk); full access key control i.e. the site is fully operational without a mouse; user local browser control over text size etc.
• 25% of users browse at 800x600 screen size while the majority browses at 1024x768 or greater. Many web sites are built to operate at the lower screen size thus wasting a lot of screen real estate, others build to the most common larger size thus forcing 25% of customers to scroll horizontally. Our templates are designed to expand or contract regardless of the screen size to ensure the maximum use of screen real estate without any horizontal scrolling.
• There is no point in having a fully featured web site if its offline or on a slow internet connection. That is why your web site will be hosted with a guaranteed uptime of 99.9% and Industry-leading (18,000 MBit) Connectivity to the internet.
• Microsoft's dominance in the browser market is being eroded by a number of other browser manufactures so it's important that your web site delivers consistent results across a wide number of browser platforms. Poorly written HTML code could at worst prevent certain users from viewing your site or at least will slow down site delivery and make it difficult for search engines to list your site properly. For this reason, all our sites are validated to ensure 0% errors with the industry leading professional validators which exceed the quality standards laid by the W3C (web's governing body) standards for X-HTML. Please be aware that many sites that validate to the W3C's free on-line validation standards would not pass the industry leading professional validation which we adhere to.
• Poor spelling, grammar or broken links will quickly annoy your customers. For this reason, each and every page of your site is checked for spelling, grammar to Microsoft standards prior to release and your site links are automatically checked daily to ensure they are functioning.
• These and hundreds of other usability design features ensure your site can reach more people and keep them on your site.

These design rules make your web site a truly usable environment that supports user's goals and maximizes your return on advertising spend. In a world of information overload your web site needs to make your customer instantly feel comfortable, communicate the value your accommodation offers over competitors and offer access to all the important site features. In summary, potential customers will spend time on your site rather than your competitors.

The majority of bookings for villas and self catering holiday accommodation are for 6 months to a year in advance and can be anything up to two years in advance so we would advise that you set-up your web presence a minimum of six months before you take ownership, otherwise you will be missing out on potential bookings. We have had many customers who set-up their web site presence in advance of ownership and sell successfully. While you are unlikely to have your own pictures of the property it is normal to set-up your web presence using photographs of a show house or similar which you can usually acquire from your builders, selling agent or management company. Why not ask to gain access to the show house to take pictures or ask your local representatives to take them for you. We would simply replace the show room pictures with your own pictures whenever they are available.

Another important reason to set-up your web site in advance of ownership is that the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo can take anything between 2-6 months to pick up on your web sites presence which will improve the traffic to your web site.