7 Reasons Replacing a Website With Social Media Is Stupid

I just read this and thought that I would share it.  The original article can be found here.

I have to say that I completely agree with this. There is no excuse for a business not to at least have a simple website to tie all their online (and offline for that matter) marketing efforts together.

Can a business exist on the web today using just a social media presence and no actual business website? Yes, but it’s a major mistake. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article that profiled small business owners who chose to use social media instead of maintaining a corporate website.

While social media is a powerful tool for marketing and building online reach for a business, it does not fill the shoes of a corporate website. Yes, small businesses should be using social media, but they should do so as part of a complete inbound marketing strategy. If you are currently only using social media and do not have a business website, check out these seven reasons to make a change.

7 Reasons Businesses Must Have a Website

1. Credibility – To a small business, trust and credibility is key. Yes, it’s easy to create a Facebook Page for your business, but this low barrier to entry means that many scammers can also book up fake business pages. A website is a step further in credibility. It involves purchasing a domain name and putting thought into content that accurately describes your business. This added depth can’t be matched with just a social media presence.

2. Value – Sure, it’s fun and rewarding to own a business, but what if you want to sell it someday? Part of what businesses look for when making acquisitions is a brand with assets. If your business doesn’t have an established website with traffic, leads, a blog, and inbound links, your business will likely be less valuable.

3. Control – Have you ever changed the paint color of your house? When you own a house, it’s easy to make improvements. On the other hand, if you are renting, it is either difficult or prohibited. The same principle applies to the web. When you have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, you are essentially “renting” space from them, and they have all the control. For example, if you wanted to have a contest on Facebook, you would need to follow their rules. A website allows you to be in total control of your online marketing.

4. Owning Transactions – Do you sell anything online? Do you want to follow up with potential sales leads? Having a website makes it easy to sell goods online or collect sales leads from interested visitors. Trying to perform these activities on top of a social media platform is not only challenging, but again requires that you follow that specific platform’s rules. These rules could force you to allocate a portion of your sales to the platform or pay for the sales leads you receive.

5. Having a Hub – Think of your online marketing like a wheel. Your strategy should have several spokes that connect back to one hub in the center. A website is the hub of your online marketing. It serves as the one place to which you drive prospects and leads for information and business transactions. Using only social media removes the hub, and the wheel crumbles.

6. Analytics – Do you want to improve your inbound marketing? You should. The problem is that most social media platforms provide very limited or no data. In contrast, many website analytic tools like HubSpot and Google Analytics can provide a wealth of data and insight. Analytics allow you, as a business owner, to improve your marketing and, ultimately, grow your business.

7. Communication – Communication is at the heart of social media. The problem is, how you communicate is dictated by the social platform you are using. What if you wanted to send your Twitter followers an email? You can’t. A website allows you to collect information from visitors and choose how you want to communicate with them, whether it’s via email, Facebook, Twitter, or that old fashioned telephone.

 

How to make your website more effective on a small budget

If you are looking to quickly and economically make some changes to your website that won’t break the bank, and that you may be able to do yourself, the content on your website is the best place to start. I think this is the area that most businesses need to work on – either by creating more content, trimming it down, or just updating it.

Review your homepage:  Your homepage is your storefront window online – make sure it invites visitors to come in and explore more of your website. Give visitors a reason to click around. It should clearly identify who you are and what you do, but it must also allow visitors to easily find your products, services or information that they are looking for when they arrive there. If they can’t, they leave, you lose!

Rewrite & simplify: Read your opening paragraphs for homepage and main pages. If they aren’t engaging your customers, then rewrite them. If your text is too wordy or blocky, or you use too much jargon, simplify and replace it with only the necessary information that people are looking for on that page or section.

Structure your content: People are lazy when it comes to reading information on a website – they just want to quickly scan through it and see if it’s interesting enough to either click something else or to read further. By using headings, sub-headings, bulleted or numbered lists, and short concise sentences, you will make the text more “web-friendly” and “scan-able” for visitors.

Write new content: Search engines love content, especially new content. Try to write some new content on a regular basis. You don’t have to write a novel, just some good valuable information that your customers will find useful.

Give contact info: Hopefully, many of the people that come to your site are going to want to contact you at some point, make sure they can by providing clear contact information for your business. Just having a form for users to fill out is not enough. Phone numbers emails and job descriptions for all staff and departments listed on your website is the key to success.

Add a sitemap: To make sure that search engines can find all this great new content, you should create a sitemap.xml file for your website. There are many tools online that can help you generate them, and they are a very quick and effective way to improve search results for your website.

Monitor your traffic: Google Analytics is a free resource that you can use to monitor most of your website stats. Depending on your website, it should be easy to have your web developer install.  This will allow you to see what pages are most popular on your site, from where and when the traffic arrives to your site, and overall how your site is doing from time to time.

If you aren’t 100% comfortable writing content, a quick search for “writing for the web” will reveal many resources to guide you on how to write copy. If you still don’t feel you are up to it, or you really want to get the most out of updating it, consider hiring a professional copywriter or web writer to help or to do the work for you.  Either way, just updating the current copy will go a long way in improving your website and its performance.

How to fix Major League Baseball

How to fix Major League Baseball (and maybe the NFL too)

This past Easter Sunday, I watched a full baseball game for the first time in close to 20 years. I was reminded that I wasn’t missing much and why I don’t care for it anymore.

When I was a kid, I knew almost all the “major players” of most all the teams in both the national  and amareican league.  Being Canadian, I knew the Montreal Expos and Toronto Blue Jays teams inside and out.  I was so pumped when they won the world series, both times, and how Montreal was poised to possiblley win the next World series, then they went on strike, and it all changed…

Not sure when the next game that I watched after the strike and lock-out, but I remember that I watched and outfielder that was getting a absorbent amount of money saunder out to catch a routine pop fly, and subsequently never reached it.  I then witnessed similar efforts from a couple of other players on both teams, and then I realized – they weren’t playing baseball, they were just there to fill a team and collect a paycheck, and a big one at that.

I played baseball all the way up till then and I was always told to do my best and always try, but how could I if all these so called heros that I had looked up to now only cared about how many millions they made and not about the game  that many of us stayed glued to our TVs to watch 3 or 4 times a week.

Then I saw reall baseball played again, but this time it was by 12 – 14 year olds who were playing for the pride of knowing that they gave it their best shot (and maybe some pizza too) and they really tried, they could win.  I don’t think I ever saw a professional seasoned baseball player that run after a ball like these kids did.  When a fly ball was hit, they all ran as hard as they could to get it.  They actually wanted to catch it – like their lives depended on it.  If you watch a MLB player run for a ball, they are  is more worried about where the fence is.

MLB players salary should be performance based  - you only hit a .237 average, then you only get 23% of your salary.  You win, you get paid, you lose, you don’t, and your lost salary goes toward a charity of your choice or a program that helps develop your sport in your region.  Pretty simple.

Now the NFL, I don’t watch, I don’t understand their issues, but I don’t think any of them are right.  If Tom Brady is worried about the 20 players that only play 3 years for every superstar contract, then maybe he and someof his friends should give some of his salary to them.  The owners, well they are greedy, no doubt.

Millionaires arguing with billionaires – still most north american families can’t afford the tickets to take them to the game in the first place!

Response to “7 Deadly Sins of RFPs”

I just finished reading an article about responding to RFP’s.  I know they are dificult all the way around, but vendors sometimes think it is easy for us on the other side of it.

The Article was “7 Deadly Sins of RFPs” written by Troy Thompson on his blog, travel2dot0.com.

RFP, as a good friend of mine explained = “Really Freakin’ Painful” and he is right.  But it isn’t all roses on the other side of it either.  The person that has to right the damn RFP in the first place has a tremendous task in the process too, as well as the people that score them.

I would like to give my opinion on some of the points in your “7 Deadly Sins of RFPs”

Overly Generic Words and Phrases
We use these for the reasons that you point out – we don’t always know what we want or what is out there. Sometimes we do, but we also use these phrases to get the vendor’s to give us their take on things.  A good RFP would also have a SOW and list of deliverables that would outline more specifics to the generic phrases in the beginning of the RFP.

Approval by Committee
If you delete all RFPs that have this phrase in them, then you might as well close your doors right now.  That is the whole reason behind an RFP is to give a committee some working knowledge on your expertise and knowledge so they can make a decision, collectively.  If only one person was the reviewing them, wouldn’t they just go out with a SOW or list of requirements and ask for some quotes?

Respond with Paper
I’ll give you this one – anyone who asks for you to courier them X# of copies of a technology based RFP shouldn’t be doing an RFP.  Electronically submitting RFPs is the way to go.  With that said – don’t send me a 50MB PDF to distribute to my committee or group, have some common sense.

No Budget
I take a little bit of exception to your comment here and this is the big reason that I am commenting.

If I put out a RFP with a budget of $40,000 on it, I can guarantee that most of the vendor’s bids will be pretty damn close to that number, because many of you are trying to squeeze every last cent (and then some) out of me.

If I don’t put I budget figure in, usually I still have a $ amount in mind, but I want to be sure that it’s on par with what I think the work is worth.  If I do that, I usually have a really well spec’d out RFP and outline exactly what my deliverables are.  If I was, correct then the most of the proposals will be somewhere close to that figure.  If they are all over the map, then I didn’t do a good job explaining what I wanted, and if they are mostly or all over my budget, I am out to lunch on my estimated value for the project.

I don’t think I have ever heard tell of someone ever using it for leverage with another vendor.

Also, if you don’t have the guts to call me and at least ask what the budget is (I might tell you, I might not), and some other questions regarding the RFP, then that’s your loss. ALWAYS CALL WITH QUESTIONS!

Expectation of a Strategy
For the most part, I agree with you here – you should not have to put ideas in an RFP that you have had limited time to research, or limited information on., or that you will not be compensated for, may not win, and could have the committee use with the successful vendor.

Sometimes though, we are looking for some insight or a strategy on how you would implement the project, or looking to have you tease us with something to gauge your creativity or experience on within your proposal.

I also want to touch on your final comment, the second-guessing, which also goes toward the above section on Approval by Committee

I feel that committees who hire qualify vendors through the RFP process, should put their faith in the vendor they selected to do the work, even if it doesn’t always fit with that they had in mind, but as long as it is on track to meet the SOW and the big picture goal of the project.

And vendors need to realize too, the committee collectively, or single members within it, might be just as, if not more, creative and intuitive than the vendor, because of their relationship and experience to the project, and vendors must be able to see this and embrace it, and maybe put their faith in the committee from time to time.

But when the questions mount, and the doubt sets in to what the vendor is doing and the committee is looking for then the second guessing happens.

We are not all death by committee – some of us are quiet fun to work with…

Thinking about social media? Don’t forget your website!

The internet and social media are great tools to effectively market your business online and capture the power of the online consumer.  Social media helps your business to be found on the internet, allow consumers to assess your products, leave reviews, comment on your business, etc., but is your website up to the task of handling the potential new traffic that you may get if you start using social media? And, if the whole point of why you want to use social media is to drive traffic to your website.  You might want to consider the next sentence:

Social media is a complete waste of time if your website sucks!

Too many fonts, old out-dated content, too much/little content, small useless photos, poor contact information. Many businesses get by with these fundamental problems in their website, some even get by using a Blog or Facebook page as their website, but most everyone loves a good solid attractive website with great content and most consumers expect a serious business to have one, especially for a tourism business.

What a lot of people don’t think about is getting their website ready so that the traffic that they will drive to it from Twitter, Blogger, and Facebook, might actually stay on it long enough to convert; whether that is a booking, an email address, a phone call – but convert to something.

The tendency is to jump on the social media bandwagon, and all your online marketing problems might get solved. If your website isn’t at the level it should be, then don’t put the effort into social media. Instead, monitor some social media channels and try to learn how you can use it within your business. A website is a reflection of you and your company, products or services, and shouldn’t be inadequate.

Work on getting your website in order first. Social media marketing and traditional print marketing are just different sources of water flowing into a bucket, and that bucket is your website. If that bucket (aka – your website) is broken or full of holes, it will never work for you!

Refrain from using Twitter, Facebook, and blogging until you have a professional website that you can constantly update with new valuable content that connects with your visitors, which leads them to your door.  When you have that step completed, then social media will be ready to really will work for you.

If you would like a website evaluation to help you find and fix the holes in your bucket, contact me.

FYI – this is the PG 13 version of this article…

Hello blog, it’s been awhile…

Not sure the last time that I posted something here, but I know it’s been awhile.

I have to admit – Blogging is hard!  Coming up with some idea that is worth while to write about, but also something that doesn’t turn into some have twisted rant (which anyone that really knows me knows that I like to do) is really hard.

This morning I was asked to write something for our newsletter that we send out to operators.  It was a bad day to do that; I didn’t sleep well last night and stayed up and read some of Seth Godin’s Linchpin – great book so far, but scaring the crap out of me to – then when I got to work it turned out that I grabbed the wrong power adapter for my laptop, which meant for a dash home to retrieve it.

So, I decided to write this article about not going forward with social media if your website isn’t prepared for it. See the next post.

We recently did some workshops across the province regarding developing a social media strategy and to talk to people about how to be informed before they went ahead with something that they weren’t ready for.  I am all for, and encourage businesses to embrace social media, but I would rather them invest the majority of their efforts in making their websites better because from what I have seen they usually suck, or have a lot of problems that should be addressed before they start trying to drive people to them with their Twitter or Facebook accounts.

In these workshops, we had every level, we had quite a few people that were at that level that they had done work to their websites, and now they could benefit from the traffic that a social media strategy could generate.  We had the ones in the middle – they had a so-so website, but it had enough problems that they would never see (or couldn’t measure/convert) the benefits of a social media strategy if they decided to do one, and then we had a few that had a really bad website, and a couple that didn’t even have a website, but yet they were interested in social media for their business?

I looked at many of the people that I and some of m counter-parts have worked with over the last few years and wonder why they are not investing in their websites, or online marketing.  don’t get me wrong, many are taking the steps and doing a great job at it, but there are still a lot that aren’t, but still sink a bunch of money into the old traditional marketing (visitor guides and print ads) that really are immeasurable, costly, and have to be prepared so far in advance that some many things can change that can make them completely useless by the time someone sees them.   I don’t get this method of thinking.  Maybe because I am cheap, I dunno…

Anyway, I think that I will try to be a little more aggressive for this blog.  If it turns out to be a place for me to rant, will so be it.

Make Trip Advisor Work for Your Tourism Business

TripAdvisor is one of the most used travel research tools online right now.  Since they boast over  35 million online traveller reviews, this makes them a very useful tool that you can use to help market your tourism business online.  Here are some of the steps to help you get started with Trip Advisor.

Take control -claim your Trip Advisor reviews

If your business is already listed on TripAdvisor, you can claim that (and any other listings) and all the information associated with them.  A listing could have been created by an employee or a previous owner or, if you have reopened or change your business name, it may be listed as closed. The thing to remember is even if you didn’t set up your own listing, it’s vital that you claim any listing relating to your business so that you control it.

Once done, add all your business details: open and close times, prices, contact details, etc.  Make sure your business is in the correct position on the map. Then start adding photos and/or videos of your business – this will help build the quality of your listing.  If your business has multiple listings, you can (and should) merge all these listings into one single business profile. Merging all the listing will combine all the reviews from all the listings together, and will help your ranking on Trip Advisor as you now there is only one business like your name with a lot of reviews instead of multiple business listings with only a few reviews.

Monitor your TripAdvisor profile

Now that you have claimed all your listings and reviews on TripAdvisor, you need to begin to monitor them so that you can respond to any comments that are posted.  You can setup TripAdvisor to send you an email every time someone has left a review for your business.  By doing this, you will be able to see all the reviews as they are posted and quickly react to any negative reviews that you may receive.  For example – if customers continue to leave poor reviews for cleanliness, you can use this to approach your cleaning staff and try and fix the problem.

Get people talking about you

Whenever you communicate with your customers during and after their visit, politely encourage them to leave you a review on TripAdvisor if they enjoyed their experience. Also, if somebody leaves a good review on your Facebook Fan page or tweets about you on twitter then reply back to them and ask them to post a review or comments on TripAdvisor.

The more (good) reviews you receive, the more exposure you will have on TripAdvisor. Good reviews result in your business ranking higher for your area to type, which will get your profile seen by more users, which will lead to more reviews, and better rankings.

TripAdvisor has made it easy for your happy customers to write reviews by creating a range of easy to install tools and logos, and link that allow customers to access and read your TripAdvisor listing from your website.

Understand –they may not always be good reviews…

I’m not a 10 /10 every day, and most likely your business isn’t either, so be prepared for a poor or negative review from time to time – it happens.  There are many ways that you can handle bad reviews – you can ignore them, criticize them, react to them, or respond to them.

The only correct way to address is the last option – respond to them. Take the time to go through their review and try and address any of their points of dissatisfaction.  If there are corrective measures that you can take to fix them, do so.  The main thing is that you don’t make a negative review any worse than it already is.  Use it, and try and spin a good story out of it. Invite the reviewer to contact you personally and discuss the problems.  If they are satisfied, they may update their review with a positive comment after talking to you.

Another thing that operators must understand is that if all your reviews are positive, then visitors my not believe that they are real reviews.  I mixture of good and bad reviews make you listing seem more authentic.

If you do get a review that you feel is unfair or would like to appeal a review by contacting TripAdvisor’s customer support – contact me if you can’t get through to their customer support, I may be able to help you.

If you can prove to them that there is a problem with the review (such as the reviewer never visited your business), then they can remove that review from your profile.

Social Media, How do I use Thee?

Let me count the ways…

I had a great conversation with Susan Sweeney today (to me a great pioneer in online marketing) and we had really interesting discussion about using Social Media in tourism, specifically, for small accommodations and attractions operators.

Many people thing that they need to have a Facebook page and post information up there so that they have a presence on Facebook and feel that they are using this channel to get business.  But people like me and Susan caution them on the fact that if you are going to commit to it, then you should think twice before doing it.  But what I realized a while after our conversation was that you need to have a Facebook page, group of fan page at all to be on Facebook – you can just advertize there – duh Jamie!  Then I thought some more, some smoke came out of my ears and I started thinking about the couple of cottage operators in the Maritimes that I noticed engaging people on Twitter.  They weren’t really into Twitter, they had some posts there about what they do and some conversation topics and status updates, but what many people didn’t notice (unless you looked hard and at the right times) was that  they were watching other people’s conversations on Twitter, and when they tweeted looking for information about staying in PEI or NS, they actually engaged the person with a question, a tip of good info, or  just a comment.  If the person asked them anything back, they would continue engaging them and maybe then they would offer the link to their website – unlike most marketers that just tweet back their promotion or marketing message to people that mention the terms they are watching.  These people use twitter a different way than most- they venture outside the box and they seem to be having success with it too.

The big challenge with social media is figuring out how much you can handle, how you can use it to make your online life a bit easier (like YouTube for embedding video and RSS to get news updates) and most importantly, how to get it to work for your business, even if it means you have to use it differently that it was intended to be used, or differently than the business down the road, or across the globe.

Social Media is all about finding a new and better way to use it…

If you have a different way of using some Social Media channel that you are willing to share, please comment or email me and let me know – Jamie@vanderkooi.ca

Jamie Vander Kooi

It isn’t what you like

Marketing (especially online marketing) is about appealing to your target audiences, not to yourself.  It’s not about you, it’s about them!

I was just reading that Tourism Queensland (Australia) are having a hard time selling their new tourism campaign ads to the Queensland population.  I just looked at them and I think they’re pretty good.  They make me think that it would be a good place to visit.   I wasn’t sure if they have pulled this ad campaign or not from the article that I read, but personally I think if they did, it would be a waste of $500,000.  The locals didn’t like it because it didn’t seem to be themed or have enough of “Australian” content that some of the 80′s ads that featured Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee) previously did.  Tough. Change is a good thing, and it is something you need to get used to…

I included the ads at the bottom of this post.

I think the same thing happened here in PEI with the “Gentle Island” theme, which was a big departure from the sucessful “Come Play on our Island” campaigns of the past.  I might agree with them here, but the new theme seems to be working… 

I think that locals and business owners should realized that their marketing, or the marketing of their province or destination shouldn’t be, or isn’t developed to appeal to them, but to the audiences and markets that they are placing these advertisements in.  I have seen some campaigns from local agencies that I don’t particularly like, or appeal to me, but they aren’t trying to attract me and my tastes and reasons for wanting to visit there would be completely different.

I personally like websites that have black backgrounds, dark colors and bright yellow and white text, but I would never try to use that theme when targeting anyone that I wasn’t 100 percent sure it would appeal to or who I want to visit it!  It’s not about me, it’s about them.

Send me a comment and tell me whether you like these ads or not…

The Tourism Queensland job campaign 

Tourism Queensland Hey, hey this is Queensland Ad 1

Tourism Queensland Hey, hey this is Queensland Ad 2

Tourism Queensland Hey, hey this is Queensland Ad 3

Tourism Queensland Hey, hey this is Queensland Ad 4

Take control of your website

Websites, email address and domain names are important business tools that you need to have a large amount of control over. EVERY business should have their own proper domain name/s, email addresses and email accounts, etc., and they should also try and take care of registering as much of their online accounts and information themselves as possible.  By having control of these important pieces of property, (and trust me – they are your property) you can limit and control almost everything that happens with you business and branding online. 

As my example business, we’ll use the business name Island View Cottages and assume that they are a cottage business in PEI.  Here is some of the information we should have control over, and how it should be completed.

Email addresses

First you should setup an email address through an email provider such as Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, etc.   These email services are disposable and it is easy to get a new email address if ever needed.  You should list one of these as your main email for your domain name when you register it – (horse before the cart concept). Once you have registered a domain, you should have an email address that matches your domain name – such as Jamie@islandviewcottages.ca.  If you only use a email address from your ISP such as Jamie@pei.sympatico.ca and I decided to switch ISPs, then I could lose access to that email address, or would have to pay to keep it active.

Domain Name

Always register a real domain name – such as islandviewcottages.ca – for your business.  You should also register this domain yourself and not rely on a hosting provider or web developer to do it for you.  If your domain name or web address for your website does not look like this or something similar then it isn’t a real domain name, for example: www.peicottagelist.ca/Islandviewcottages is not a domain, just a folder of a listing service’s website – don’t pay for this – register a domain (they’re less than $15 a year now)

Ok, now what?

Now that you have an email address setup and domain names setup correctly, you need to use these pieces of information to get the rest of your online information correctly in place.

Analytics Account

There are many types of website stats packages out there, but since Google Analytics is one of the most popular ones, I will use it for this example.  Use your business email (or a Gmail account if you created one) and register for Google Analytics.  You should then register your website for an Analytics account and provide the Analytics code to your web developer.  Many web developers offer to do all this for you, but if they don’t give you admin access to the account, then you can’t make any changes without them doing it for you (and possibly charging for it).  Also if they go out of business or you part ways, then you may not be access the account information.

Social Media

If you want to get into social media and use these channels to promote and market your business, then you need to make sure you get these done properly.  Facebook for example can now be directed to an account name, and if possible, that should match your business name and the name of the Facebook group or fan page for your business.  YouTube is very similar to this structure too.  You create a “Channel” and then register it to an account name.  Just like a domain name, you should do all this yourself or at least have someone help you, but use your email addresses instead of theirs.

Website Widgets/API

These are little bits of HTML code that you get from other services to display content on your site. If you want to have a Google or a MapQuest map embedded into your website, you would user a widget or API to do it.  If you allow someone else to do this on your behalf, then you want to make changes to that map or API, and you don’t have access to the account that it was created with, then you may have to re-create a whole new map and replace all the HTML code that builds that map.  This also goes for many other things such as Flickr photo galleries, Blogs, RSS feeds into and out of your site, audio and video podcasts you may use, video applications, and ecommerce applications, the list goes on and on.

The important thing to remember is if you are going to put/build these items into your site, and they require an email account or a login to manage them, and then make sure it is an email account or a login that you have access too.

Hosting Services

This is one that you should have setup yourself, but it is OK to have a developer handle this for you.  Sometime it is even better to have them do it, because they usually have partnerships with hosting companies that allows them to offer discounted prices, and custom built packages that match the style and platform of the type of websites they offer or develop.  But if you are comfortable handling this yourself, then it isn’t a bad idea to do so.

Conclusion

I have just listed some of the common stumbling blocks that many people overlook or don’t understand.  Most of these are very simple to do – you will be surprised how simple once you do them. You don’t always have to do all these things yourself, but if you are going to get someone to do them for you, such as a friend, a web developer, or even an employee, give them some clear direction that you would like them to document anything that they do, and supply them with an email account that they can use to do the work for you.   If you ever do part ways, then all you should ever have to do is change the password on the email account that you originally gave them access to.

It’s never too late to start getting your “online house in order” with the above mentioned items.

If you have any questions or comments on this, or would like help in getting your “online house in order” please contact me at Jamie@Vanderkooi.ca or Jamie@TourismTechnology.com.