I’m making no secret of my plans to boost this website right to the top of Google under our main (and only) keyphrase – Gatwick Hotels.
The first phase of this is simply to get the website indexed. We have achieved this and currently show up 2nd when you type GatwickHotels.info. This is a start but is ultimately worthless. A Google search for Gatwick Hotels reveals much less success – we are not listed at all. Clearly there is still a mountain to climb.
Choosing the top level domain for this project was a tough decidion to make. I knew from the start that I wanted to target the keyphrase ‘Gatwick Hotels’ and in an ideal world I would have simply bought GatwickHotels.com and got on with it.
That, however was not to be. Niether was I able to buy a .net or .co.uk and hyphenating was also out (ie Gatwick-Hotels) for all the preferable TLDs. I was left with a toss-up between a .eu and a .info. Research revealed that .info is often associated with spammers in the eyes of the major search engines. Despite this I prefered it infinitely to the few other available alternatives.
Subsequently we go in to this project taking a few fairly large steps back but it just makes the challenge all the more tantilising. Watch this space to see how we get on.
About two years ago I built an interactive 3d flythrough of a Gatwick hotel. The new Gatwick Hotels virtual tour will work in much the same way making this original experiment a dry-run for this more polished, more successful project.
Functionality wise it was a success. The user was given a 360 view of the Gatwick hotel and the ability to navigate about at their leisure. File size was a concen so the hotel was presented in a stylised, limited coulour palette. The orignal plan was to render directly to vector but my PC couldn’t perfom the renders quick enough so I ended up with JPGs. Download times were border line acceptable as preloading was seperated by rooms.
You can see this demo here: http://gatwickhotels.info/gatwick-hotels-demo/gatwick-hotels-demo.html
The new Gatwick hotels virtual tours will work in a similar way to this original model. The user will enter the Gatwick hotel, look around at their leisure and click on the different roms they want to visit.
Fundamentally the final version will be photorealistic. Where I used block colour in the dry-run I will be using realistic modeling and rendering techniques to raise the production values imeasurably to create the definitive virtual tour.
By developing a site that offers an abundance of unique content in an innovative and exciting way we hope to create a site that naturally attracts incoming links and the Google juice that accompanies them.
So what will this content contain? Firstly I intend to include the ultimate, user-friendly booking system to make booking a room the simplest process it can possibly be. This system will include a calendar for checking availability and a secure server for the protected capture of credit card details.
Next, we will showcase the Gatwick hotels via a visually impressive virtual tour. This will be a virtual tour like nothing seen before – not a 360 degree photograph to rotate but an interactive, photorealistic 3d model to navigate. The tour will begin outsdie the building, the user will then move through to reception at their leisure. The controls will be innovative and simple to grasp.
Once inside the building the user willt hen be ablet o explore deeper into the hotel, visiting the bar, restaurant and rooms where applicable. Realistically not every room will be 3d modeled but the key areas and sample of each basic room type will be the minimum on offer.
As well as standard links I would like the users to navigate via a virtual receptionist. The receptionist will answer any questions the user may have in real time and take their booking when required. An instant messaging link will allow the user to type any question and recieve an instant response from a live person. In an ideal world, a text to speech engine and combined lip synching could make the receptionist speak the reply back to the end user but this may be a bridge to far for our inital launch.
Above all the website should offer a never before seen approach to booking a hotel room. I want to give the end-use the same experience they might have if they wlked up to one of our hotels and asked for a personal guided tour before deciding whether of not to book. However, this alone os not enough. Not only should it be ground breaking, it should also be functional. This combination of aesthetics and functionality is absolutely key to the success of this project.
Gatwick Hotels has been conceived to fulfill two purposes. Firstly I intend to develop a website that will rank very well under the keyphrase ‘Gatwick Hotels’. My family business is hotels and together we operate three in the Gatwick area. Each hotel has its own website and they are ranked well enough under a variety of terms; Gatwick B&B, Gatwick Bed and Breakfast, and Gatwick Hotels with Parking are all up there but ultimately the core of traffic is searching the phrase ‘Gatwick Hotels’, a term forwhich we get very little traffic to any of our sites. This site will address that in balance.
Secondly, I intend to raise the profile of my website development business, creation101. Creation has been going for a few years now and I have built the business up by offering reasonably simple websites at great rates. Now with a great team to help me I would like tp start pitching for bigger and higher profile jobs. Gatwick Hotels will act as a showcase of our skills as an up and coming digital agency.
Dave