Whenever we tune into the TV news in the winter months, we are sure to see stories about the latest storm that is pummeling the Midwest, the lake-effect snow that is piling up on Buffalo, or the latest Nor’easter that is heading up the coast to New England. Our lives seems to revolve around the current weather, whether it means there will be school cancellations, problems getting into work, or difficulty starting a campfire at a campsite the following night.

If you run a campground, you know that your customers are craving the latest weather forecast. If the weekend is going to be sunny and warm, you are sure to get a barrage of last-minute callers inquiring about vacancies. If the weather is bad, you can count on calls attempting cancellations due to the sudden death of Aunt Clara or young Billy’s sudden case of the mumps. Inclement weather forecasts are a good reminder for why your business needs to have a clearly written cancellation policy in place.

Years ago, when I worked rather extensively with the New England ski industry, it was my understanding that the major ski resorts made an annual practice of wining and dining the chief meteorologists at major market TV stations, in attempt to get them to put a more positive spin on upcoming snowstorms. Like the glass that is both half empty and half full, the same snowstorm can be described in terms of gloom and doom or as the driving force behind the best ski conditions in years.

All that aside, your campers are always going to be obsessed with the weather forecast for next weekend. You can’t fight human nature. When it comes to online weather, there are two major competitors and two major players: The Weather Channel’s Weather.com and AccuWeather’s AccuWeather.com. They each have more than one free option. If you would like to post the current weather conditions and forecast on your website, here is how to do it.

The Weather Channel / Weather.com

Let’s start with Weather.com and its Weather Widget. This could not be simpler to create and install on your site. To put a Weather Widget on your website is as easy as going to Weather.com, scrolling down to the bottom of the page, clicking on “Weather Tools” (under the “Our Products” menu), then clicking on the “WEATHER Widget” link. Enter your city or zip code, choose Fahrenheit or Celsius, choose a horizontal or vertical orientation (whichever will fit better on your website), choose one of 10 themes (including Outdoors), the click on the “Get the Code” link. Copy and paste (or send to your webmaster). It’s as easy as that. For a direct link, go to:
www.weather.com/services/oap/weather-widgets.html

If you would like a similar but somewhat more robust option, start at the same page, but click on the “NEW & Improved Weather On Your Website” link. This one will associate the weather widget with your specific website and its authorized domain. In subsequent steps, this tool will allow you to choose one of four sizes and orientations, will display your city or town name, and will allow you to choose from twice as many background images or one of two seasonal collections (which alternate four images with the seasons.) Depending upon the size of the widget, it will also allow you to display localized real-time information showing your choice of several options that include wind speed and direction, humidity, UV index, atmospheric pressure, dew point, visibility, and the dreaded “chance of precipitation”. In exchange for being able to embed this tool onto your website, you will also choose a category for the unobtrusive advertising text links that will appear on your widget. Again, when you are finished, you will get a snippet of code (in this case, longer than the code for the basic website widget) that you or your webmaster will be able to insert into your site. For a direct link, go to:
http://www.weather.com/services/oap.html

AccuWeather.com

From the AccuWeather.com website, click on the “Apps & Downloads” icon and link at the bottom of the page. Then choose the “FREE Weather for Your Site” option for the AccuWeather Widget, which is created with a responsive design that will automatically scale for readability on virtually any desktop computer or mobile device. Basically, there are two weather widgets that can be used either individually or in combination. The first is the Current Weather Widget, the second is the 36 Hour Weather Widget, and the third is a combination Linked Weather Widget.

The Current Weather Widget comes in one of four sizes, and the 36 Hour Weather Widget is fully responsive, scaling from 890 pixels down to 320 pixels, depending upon the device. (You can even preview this feature prior to downloading the code!) With either widget, you can set the forecast for a fixed location (presumably your campground’s location) or set it to auto detect the user’s location (not as useful in your instance). You can also choose a language, which is very useful if you have a version of your website in Spanish, French, or another language other than English.

Finally, the AccuWeather widgets include the popular hourly forecasts, links to a local video forecast, radar, and weather maps. For a direct link, go to:
http://www.accuweather.com/en/free-weather-widgets

Weather, love it or hate it. However you look at it, your business needs it, and your customers want access to this information. Would you rather they get it from you or from somebody else?

In the very early days of the Internet, people would visit websites simply for the novelty of viewing their content. It didn’t take much to engage an audience for your product or service at a time when few of your competitors even had a presence online. You were there, and that was cool enough.

Today, with nearly 4 billion pages of content, your website is a very small fish in an enormous ocean that is filled with sea creatures of monstrous proportions. If and when visitors find you online, they want to find answers to their questions, presented in an organized manner that makes the information easy to find.

In the interest of streamlining the user experience, it may be time to reevaluate your site – adding, updating, and cross-referencing content as needed. As is often the case, a good place to start is a review of your statistics on Google Analytics. I would suggest taking a careful look at the new Behavior Flow data found under the Content reports.

Your website’s Behavior Flow report will graphically present the “flow” of visitor traffic from page to page within your site, allowing you to identify the content that keeps visitors engaged, as well as the content that seems to be showing your visitors the door. Are there popular paths of content, and do specific pages frequently lead visitors to another secondary page? How much time do visitors spend on specific pages, do they appear to be searching for content, and are they spending time viewing a photo gallery or embedded videos? These questions – and more – should all be answered. If there is measurably popular content on your website, provide more of the same by either adding to the page or adding one or more pages of related content.

Photo galleries and videos consistently prove to be popular content that engages visitors. Because each photo is said to convey a thousand words, people can often see the answers to their questions right there in your photos. (“Yes, I see a dog on a leash, so pets are allowed.”) Videos can be even better than photos because they allow you to tell your story. Just be sure that your story anticipates and answers questions, rather than creating a new set of questions that will remain to be answered. For example, a video may show a security gate, but does it leave people wondering about access cards? Or you may mention the tranquility of quiet nights, but does it say when your quiet hours begin and end? Think ahead, anticipate questions, and provide answers.

Make Your Phone Time Count

If you find that you or your staff are repeatedly answering the same phone questions, is it because the answers are either not available or too difficult to find on your website? If that is the case, you only have yourself to blame. Make your time answering the phone more productive, answering campsite-related questions that are prerequisite to finalizing a reservation. Each of the following questions should be answered on your website, in a logical location that is easy to find.

• Will I have wi-fi at my site?
• Are pets allowed in your cabin rentals?
• Will your swimming pool be open during our stay?
• Is there a fee to use your miniature golf course?
• Is there a charge to run the air conditioning unit in my RV?

It is essential that fee-related information, in particular, be referenced on your website. In some instances, the information should probably be provided in more locations than one. For example, your pet policy should probably appear in your rules, on your cabin rentals page, and directly on your reservation request form. The duplication of content is far preferable than dealing with a disgruntled guest who shows up at your registration desk without the rabies vaccination certificate that you require or with two Pit Bulls that you do not allow.

According to Emily Yellin, author of “Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us,” the average customer service phone call handled by a small business like yours costs $7.50 to process. This takes into account compensation for the staff member who fields the call and any subsequent follow-up or fulfillment action that might be required. The smaller your business and the more limited your staff, the more likely it is that you will be the one taking the calls yourself. While you are providing those answers that should already appear on your website, you are taking the time that could be applied toward a more productive task. It could also come at the expense of a customer who is ready to make an immediate reservation decision who is instead met with a busy signal or a request to be put on hold.

As is usually the best practice, try to put yourself in the role of your potential customer. If necessary, ask a trusted third party for assistance in evaluating your site. Ensure that your website is a properly maintained component of a well-oiled machine that generates the new business that is the key to your overall business growth and survival.

Have you ever seen a website that was built under the “Kitchen Sink Theory” of website design? These were much more common in the early days of the World Wide Web, fifteen or twenty years ago, when common practices in design and layout were still evolving. Today, they are most often the result of do-it-yourself efforts, where a business owner mistakenly believes that he can build his own website, has the time to devote to the ongoing project, and doesn’t need to pay somebody to do what he can do himself. He is correct on at least one count, because it is true that anybody can build their own website.

The people who build their own websites are usually “Type A” personalities who find it difficult to delegate responsibility and who undervalue the labor of anybody other than themselves. In other instances, the creation of the website that can literally make or break a business is entrusted to Uncle Fred or Young Danny, the kid who lives up the street and who is “really good with computers”. Sometimes I wonder if these folks also provide their own medical and dental examinations and treatments!

Of course, there are companies out there that have encouraged this line of thinking by providing step-by-step do-it-yourself templates and inexpensive (or even free – with a few caveats) website hosting services. Those companies include Intuit, Homestead, Vistaprint, Wix, Tripod and many others. Choose a template, pick colors, upload photos, edit text, drag and drop, watch the money roll in, and become the next Internet millionaire. It’s as simple as that.

What the do-it-yourself website companies – as well as Uncle Fred and Young Danny – do not provide is marketing experience, an understanding of your particular business and industry, professional graphic design skills, proofreading and copy editing capabilities, and any interest in preventing your website from going down in flames. Yes, you can build yourself a website with every annoying bell and whistle imaginable. Yes, even bells and whistles themselves, if that’s what you want, including – you guessed it – the kitchen sink.

One of the most common do-it-yourself webmaster mistakes is to believe that lots of content will make a page more important in the eyes of the search engines. The more the merrier. Lots of text and lots of photos. Even better, lots of font variations, lots of colors, lots of animation, and lots of random clipart.

I recently came across exactly this type of website, built by the owner of one of the highest rated and most well-known campgrounds in the United States. The home page alone had 2,777 words of text, 30 photos, 3 large graphic files, and 9 pieces of clipart (4 of which were animated.) The page also included a hit counter, navigation way down near the bottom of the page, and 117 HTML warnings. The page clearly was not going to be a contender to win any awards for aesthetic design, but how did it fare with the search engines? Funny you should ask. When I did a search on Google for what I thought should be the single most intuitive search phrase for this park, it did not appear anywhere on the first 20 pages of search results! In addition, not that websites are intended to be printed, if somebody should try to print out a copy of just the Home page of the site, it would take 27 sheets of paper.

The only way that anybody is going to find this campground’s website is if they are already familiar with the campground, search for camping in the town where it is located, or click on a link from another website. If the owners are looking for new business, they better plan on word of mouth referrals.

If nothing else, the lesson to be learned here is that marketing sense and design skills are important elements in the construction of a successful website. Many people refer to the importance of content that appears “above the fold”, a reference to the location of the most important content – in terms of newsstand appeal – on the front page of a daily newspaper. Although some folks argue that it is the top 600 pixels of content, the “fold” is nearly impossible to define on a website, particularly with the explosive growth in the use of mobile devices, where users expect to scroll for content. The important consideration is not so much the location of the content as the design of the content. Without organization, a cluttered page on a website could easily become as impossible to navigate as War and Peace had Leo Tolstoy written his novel in a single rambling chapter.

Am I suggesting that your campground’s website must be built by a professional website design company? Absolutely! Lest anybody conclude that my intent is to promote my own company’s website development services, let me provide a list of some of our competitors within the campground industry. Those include AGS/Texas Advertising, Strait Web Solutions, Big Rig Media, and other more regional service providers. Many of these companies will have booth space at the fall campground association conferences, from National ARVC to the various state associations. My own company will also be found once again at the enormous IAAPA Attractions Expo, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida.

Whoever you turn to, your next website should embrace the latest technology and have a design that holds its own against the websites of major resorts, theme parks, and airlines – not simply your competitor down the road. Look for a responsive site that works as well on an iPhone, Android device or a Blackberry as it does on a desktop or laptop computer. Most importantly, trim the fat, and present users with a site with the kind of eye appeal and design flow that consistently leads them to your intended call to action. The right website is designed to generate reservations, not frustrations!

Maybe you are familiar with the concept of urban legends, plausible but untrue stories that are perpetuated by people who blindly accept and share this misinformation when they read it online. In the old (pre-Internet) days, these were often referred to as “Old Wives’ Tales”, and included nonsense such as how it takes swallowed chewing gum seven years to pass through a person’s digestive system or how you will drown if you go swimming less than an hour after eating. Some of these tales still persist, although most of us have smartened up to the newer wave of wealthy Nigerian widows wanting to share their fortunes and the alleged family members stuck in an airport with an urgent need for a loan.

When it comes to websites and what it takes to attain top search engine rankings, the myths seem to be never-ending, and new scams surface (and older scams resurface) on a regular basis. The fact is that quality content, well-written text, and incoming links are all important factors when the Google or Bing search engine robots are evaluating your website, but the following bits of frequently espoused advice are purely fiction.

1)    Companies can provide top search engine placement. Those telemarketing calls that we all receive, with a pre-recorded message about your website’s poor search engine placement and how the caller’s company can remedy the situation, are sheer rip-offs. First of all, you are only being called because you have a business telephone number that is on a telemarketing list. The caller has not looked at your website and does not even know if you even have a website. They DO know that you probably have money in your bank account. Most of these callers imply that they are affiliated with Google, but they have no connection whatsoever.

2)    Hyphenated domain names are better for SEO. In reality, long domain names and hyphenated domain names should be your last choice, and they have no impact upon SEO. Which example makes more sense – SpaceCenterCamping.com or The-best-campground-near-the-Johnson-Space-Center.com?

3)    The .com extension is ranked higher by search engines. Not true; however, the .com version of a domain name should always be your first choice because many people subconsciously think of .com when they think of domain names. If your domain name is WonderlandCamping.biz, it will be ranked just as highly as WonderlandCamping.com would be by search engines, but many users might inadvertently type in the domain name with the .com extension, usually bringing them to the website of another business (which beat you to the .com), making the .biz extension less desirable.

4)    An older domain name is more valuable than a newer domain name. An older domain name with a high existing search engine ranking is better than a new domain (which spends time in what is referred to as the “Google sandbox” before it gains traction), but there are also older domains that – due to their former content – have actually been delisted by search engines. Typically, the people making this argument are ones who have a domain name that they are trying to sell. The point is that the age of the domain name, in itself, has nothing to do with search engine ranking.

5)    If you register your domain name for the maximum 10 years, it shows the search engines that you have a serious business, so they will rank your website more highly. I actually sat on a roundtable a few years ago where one of my competitors made this outrageously incorrect statement. The fact is that this myth was intentionally started by GoDaddy, in an attempt to get people locked into their service for a longer period of time. It has zero effect on search engine ranking.

6)    Buying sponsored search advertising will influence and improve your organic search engine ranking. This is patently untrue. One has nothing to do with the other, although significant increases in the amount of traffic to, from, and within your site could be a contributing factor in a search engine’s ranking algorithms.

7)    Link exchanges and reciprocal links will improve your search engine ranking. This is also usually untrue, unless the other businesses have something in common with your business, such as serving the same niche of customers. If you own a shoe store, and your website has a page of links to the websites of the major airlines, this is going to do nothing to enhance your search engine ranking.

8)    Load time is no longer important because most people have high-speed Internet access. Actually, load time is still important. Faster loading pages have lower bounce rates (representing the numbers of people who reach a site but leave almost immediately) and their rankings will be higher. This does not suggest that a page should be all text and no graphics, since that type of content is unlikely to persuade visitors to follow the intended call to action.

All in all, it helps to exercise a bit of common sense before concluding that anything and everything that you read online is reliable and true. Even if something sounds plausible, get a second opinion. Either ask somebody whose knowledge you trust, or do a Google search for the claim to see if there are either differences of opinion or a downright disproval.

If you have been paying attention long enough, over the years you will have heard all kinds of Web design concepts touted as the newest answer to vanilla ice cream. One by one, they have either fallen by the wayside or are ready to follow the lemmings into that ditch. Progressive JPEG images, animated GIF images, and frames were early concepts that failed to stand the test of time. More recently, Flash animation was once considered the rage; however, as soon as support was dropped by Apple’s iOS (running iPhones and iPads), Flash became about as popular as a case of head lice.

Understandably, many people have grown a bit suspicious when they hear about anything that is marketed as the latest and greatest, so what is the story with responsive Web design? The best way to start answering that question is an explanation of what it is and how it works. Let me begin by saying that, in general, change is a good thing. As the Internet evolves, improvements tend to enhance and improve the user experience.

You may have seen the responsive Web design concept promoted by your local TV stations and similar businesses, usually along the lines of “One Address for Every Device”. Unlike a separate mobile website, responsive technology allows a single website to respond to each user device and display the site in the most appropriate form. Responsive sites are flexible and able to adjust, rearrange, and optimize content on a wide range of displays and input devices. The concept can be summarized in the word fluidity. Responsive sites are based upon the use of a fluid grid, fluid graphics and photos, fluid text, and a fluid background. The grid features a series of stops or fluid breakpoints, where the content switches from one representation to the next.

Unlike a mobile app, which needs to be downloaded and installed (and then may be rarely used), a responsive site is not limited to any one platform, avoiding duplication of expense for Android and Apple devices (with Blackberry, Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Kindle, Nook, and other upcoming mobile devices out of luck). Unlike a separate mobile-friendly website, which incurs a separate set of costs and often trims down the range of content that is presented to the users of mobile devices, a responsive website presents a consistent range of content that is optimized for every user’s device. This is a new way of building websites, and it is being quickly embraced both by top developers and savvy clients as a more future-proof, economical and elegant approach to delivering content across the expanding ocean of Web capable devices.

When visiting a responsive website using a desktop computer or laptop, you are presented with one version of the site. Using a tablet or smartphone, you are presented with alternate versions that are automatically optimized for the display size and touch-based input. When viewing a responsive website on a conventional desktop or laptop computer, you can actually resize your browsing window to see the content transform in real time as you reach the grid stops or breakpoints. Cool? Yes!

My own company’s first venture into responsive website design was the new website built for the Vermont Campground Association, the first responsive campground association website in the United States. The accompanying graphic shows the content as displayed on a variety of common devices.

Other than keeping up with technology and presenting your business in a savvy technological light, what are the other advantages of turning to responsive design for your next website? First of all, as I have already alluded, the total cost will probably be less than the cost of developing separate conventional and mobile sites. It is also no longer necessary to register a separate “mobile” domain name or even create a separate subdomain for your mobile content. In all likelihood, this will reduce your recurring hosting costs.

One big advantage presented by responsive technology is the consistency of branding that it allows. No longer do you have to wonder whether somebody is viewing your “full” website on a desktop computer or the abbreviated content on a mobile device. You also can eliminate those “Click here to view our mobile site” or “Click here to download our mobile app” links. A responsive site sends those links to the buggy whip museum!

Check the Google Analytics on your website. (If your website is not running Google Analytics, stop what you are doing, and get it installed!) I just checked the Google Analytics for one well-known campground website that we maintain, and the statistics are compelling. The site generates enough traffic for these statistics to be both meaningful and valid. Over the last 12 months, 28.1% of the visitors to their website were using a mobile device. Within the last month, that percentage shot up to 39.9%, and within the last week is up to 41.7%. Within the last 24 hours? It’s up to 42.3%. Do you see a trend?

Just as important, without either a responsive or a mobile website, visitors to this campground’s website who are using mobile devices are spending roughly two-thirds of the time that is spent by visitors using conventional computers, and the bounce rate is an astounding 85% higher. (The bounce rate represents visitors who reach a website and leave quickly.) Yes, people using mobile devices are prone to make quicker decisions, but these numbers simply represent lost traffic … and lost traffic means lost business.

Perhaps most importantly, responsive technology is good for your website’s SEO (search engine optimization). In fact, both Google and Bing have endorsed responsive Web design. Only one address needs to be indexed, and only one address needs to be checked when viewing your analytic reports. No longer will multiple versions of content be diluting the search engine ranking of your pages. Whatever form it takes, search engines have always hated (and penalized) duplicate content. It’s as simple as that!

Now that I have explained what it is, how it works, and its many advantages, are you ready to decide? Will your next website be built using yesterday’s technology or for tomorrow’s users?

Content for this article was also contributed by Joshua Pelland and Charles Davis, Pelland Advertising staff members.