20 Questions to ask before redoing your website

Here’s a list of 20 questions and tips that you should ask yourself before redoing your hotel website design

What is the goal of the site? Is the goal to generate revenue? Is it to maximize conversion? Is it to attract new customers, retain customers? Under ideal circumstances, what will the outcome be of your website? If your website has multiple goals, make sure you put them in the right order.
Who are you trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does he want? Is it a designer? Or maybe your representation company that wants all hotels within the chain to be equal, and therefore all fantastic brochures (yes offline, and therefore also online) should look the same? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?
How many people on your team have to be involved? The GM, Director of Marketing, Sales Managers, F&B managers, C&B managers, all department heads?
Who are you trying to reach? Is it everyone? Potential customers? Returning customers? Other businesses? Leisure customers? Business customers? Groups?
That group that you’re trying to reach, are there other sites that they already enjoy visiting? Maybe there is something you can learn from these sites.
Are you trying to sell something online? How easy should it be to buy for your visitors? Make sure the buying functionality (i.e; booking engine) is simple to use.
Is there a story that you’d like to tell? Are you providing your customers the right experience with that story?
Do you gain permission to follow up with your client?
Do you hope that your customers will watch you, and keep watching (following) you?
Do you need people to talk about you using certain social media? Do you need to be marketed virally?
Do people find the site via word of mouth?
Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is there this website only?
Do you want people to call you? Keep in mind that offline conversion is and will always be much higher than online conversion.
How often would you like people to come by?
Who needs to update this site? How often? How often can you afford to (fully) revise this site? Google is continuously looking for fresh content, so you should be able to generate new content, easily, yourself, on your website.
Does showing up in the search engines matter? Is it maybe more important then some of the previous points? Are you willing to sacrifice any? If showing up in the search engines matters, which keywords matter? Are you aiming for short tail keywords, mid tail, or long tail? How much do we want to spend to be found on all these keywords? Calculate this carefully, and just for fun, compare your website SEO cost to the commission that you pay your 3rd party websites.
Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do languages or browsers play a role?
How much money do you have to spend? How much time can we afford to spend?
How much revenue do you want to generate? What if you don’t make target? What if you go over, far over?