Vacation Rental Owners Join Forces to Build Owner’s Website from Scratch

Vacation rental owners are helping one of their own by creating and publishing a personal website using everything they have learned about the business of marketing vacation rental properties.

(PRWEB) March 4, 2005

Many vacation rental owners just don’t ‘get’ the internet. Although the web is the most powerful tool for marketing vacation rentals, for many owners it has come a little too late in life for them to embrace the net.

So at the Lay My Hat (http://www.laymyhat.com) advice site for holiday rental owners, they are building a website from scratch for one lucky rental owner. Lay My Hat is the online community for holiday rental owners, and is free to use for any rental owner.

Tansy knows she needs a personal website to get her Normandy beach rental property seen by her worldwide target market, but she doesn’t know the first thing about getting one built and ‘out there’.

In a unique community venture, Tansy’s fellow vacation rental owners decided to build one for her, by contributing what they can to each stage of her site’s creation. Some know a thing or two about photography or writing compelling descriptions, others are more technically minded and can help with search engine optimization, or using style sheets. Each contributes what they can, no matter how small.

Lay My Hat founder, Paolo De Paolis is impressed with the contributions other owners are making to Tansy’s site: “It’s heartening to see other owners, some potentially competitors, giving so much time for free to help out one of their own. With such a variety of opinions on which way the site should be heading, it’s fascinating to see the thought processes behind each decision along the way.

“This project is not just about Tansy. She’ll get her site created for free, but it’s more about the broader picture of helping out anyone in her position – anyone who doesn’t know how to build and publish their own site can follow each step of the process at Lay My Hat. It’s like a step-by-step guide to building a vacation rental property site.”

The evolution of the site has been split into separate discussion threads on the Lay My Hat advice forum for vacation rental owners, for example:

  • Choosing the best domain name for the property
  • Web hosting options
  • Selecting the photos
  • Logo design
  • Layout choices
  • Researching the keywords
  • Optimizing for the search engines

“The strength of doing this all on the forum” adds De Paolis, “is that you can show everything as you go along. For instance, we can put up all of Tansy’s photos and people can say which one should be used and why. Or for the look of the site, we can see all the design options on the screen, rather than talking about something abstract. It makes it much easier for other rental owners to follow, and contribute.”

The Lay My Hat ‘Build a site from scratch’ vacation rental project is ongoing, and can be seen here:

http://www.laymyhat.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=29

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