When times get tough (even when times are good) it’s critical to invest money where it will help your business. But as this article makes clear, you don’t want to be spending more than you should. Uncontrollable items like property taxes and huge cable TV bills make it all the more important to make smart decisions in areas where you’re in control of what you spend and what you get.

We created SiteValet with this in mind:

• We think your website is absolutely critical to your business and you shouldn’t simply be getting by on “I already have a website,” when that website is outdated and ineffective.
• But you also shouldn’t be wasting thousands of dollars on custom website design and development. The return on that investment is just too questionable.

We give you a great, modern, effective website that’s better than most custom sites. And instead of charging thousands of dollars, we charge a low monthly fee and no up-front costs.

Spend smart!

While this tweet is about real estate, it’s basically the same for inn, B&B and hotel websites: most of your potential customers are “buying” you sight unseen. This makes your website and the information you provide on it important. And it makes the use of clear, informative, compelling photos a necessity.

Rare is the restaurant that doesn’t have a website these days. Even rarer is finding a good one.

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More damaging, to my mind, are websites which whether by omission or clunky design lack basic information.

Other problems he discusses include:

• lack of clean, logical overall design
• use of gimmicks like background music
• lack of interesting, fresh content (particularly blogs)

I’ve given my thoughts on some of these problems in this series of posts.

If you read the article, be sure to read through the comments to get an idea of how certain things on websites can really irritate your site’s visitors.

The focus is mostly on the startup/entrepreneurial side of things, but still a good write-up.

Thanks to Stephen, Kevin and the folks at Tnooz for the coverage.

The Oatmeal is a funny, irreverent site. Today they take on this topic and others in 8 Websites You Need to Stop Building.

Just over one-third of consumers (34%) report that a technical glitch will lower their likelihood of visiting a travel Web site again.

PhocusWright’s Consumer Response to Travel Site Performance.

A new survey of almost 3,000 leisure travelers indicates a very low tolerance for glitches on your website. We think this includes a number of the problems we discuss in our series, What’s Wrong With My Website?.

Are you comfortable that your visitors aren’t experiencing any of these “glitches” on your website?

Special thanks to Cheryl Paynter. Cheryl is the Director of Hotel Operations for D.P. Murphy Group, owners of Stanhope Beach Resort & Conference Centre. She said some great things about SiteValet. My two favourites are this one from the video:

We operate hotels. We don’t understand the technology of websites.

And this one, which unfortunately didn’t make the cut:

I don’t know why anybody in this business would build a website from scratch with something like SiteValet available.

Thanks to reporter Steve Bruce and his producer Tracy Lightfoot for inviting us and pulling this together.

Comments, thoughts, questions. Would love to hear from you in the comments section below.

Kuler is a website by Adobe that shows user-submitted color palettes. The palettes are very nicely presented. And you can filter/sort them by Most Popular, Highest Rated, and so on.

If you’re thinking of having a Custom or Semi-Custom Theme developed, take a look at Kuler for some ideas.

Note: these are visual mockups from our designers. The final themes may end up looking a little different.