Wallop's Tools and Services

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Over the years we found most content management systems to be unnecessarily complex, hard to use, and packaged with loads of needless features. Like you, the majority of our clients had simple needs - they just wanted to make periodic updates to their content, publish an article, event, or PDF.

In the end, we decided to build our own. It's simple, fast, and easy to use. You get to edit your copy as you see it on your website - not on a screen that bears little relation to your actual website. If you can click a few buttons and type, you can update your website using our CMS.

the wallop cms at work on the Tourism Tofino website

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is a critical component of any successful website, especially for businesses in the hospitality industry. The websites we build are naturally search engine friendly because we use proper semantics and standards compliant code. This means that search engine bots (spiders) will have an easy time indexing and properly categorizing your website. We also integrate all the sites we build with Google Analytics, which will be one of the primary interfaces for your overall search engine marketing efforts.

We'll tell you in plain English how search engines work, what you need to do to earn good rankings, and give you an honest assessment of your SEO needs. We've forged a strong collaborative partnership with one of the industry leaders in the field, and have fine-tuned a working process that is deliberate, efficient, and highly effective.

some Google search results

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most comprehensive tool on the web for monitoring and analyzing website traffic. It also happens to be free, but it takes a considerable amount of dedication and experience to truly harness the power of this application.

Having said that, we don't just implement Analytics, but rather apply our knowledge and experience to provide better opportunities for you to truly measure and analyze the effectiveness of your online marketing initiatives. For example, when we send out a newsletter, we track people back to your website and follow them all the way to a conversion. We see how many times someone has looked at your newsletter, and on which links they're clicking. We can tell you how much traction you are getting, segmented by global regions.

There are countless ways you can leverage the power of Analytics; we'll make sure your business is utilizing it to its full potential, and continuously make adjustments that reflect the goals of your ongoing marketing initiatives.

the Google Analytics dashboard

Online Forms

Forms are typically the first point of contact from the prospective customer and business. Using this data wisely can greatly assist a coordinated marketing campaign.

Essentially we are only limited by our imagination in terms of what can implemented, and the general trend is that more and more information is being submitted online. This can provide many tangible benefits for hotels like cost savings, improved response times, centralized data storage, and guest convenience.

Some examples of forms we've created for our clients include:

• Contact and newsletter subscription forms
• Meeting room request forms
• Online RFP forms for weddings and meetings
• Welcome gift forms
• Online concierge forms
• "Send a message to a guest" forms
• Guest comments forms
• Membership forms

a spa treatment request form on the Wickaninnish Inn site

a 'send a message to a guest' form on the Inn at Laurel Point site

Interactive Property Tour

Virtual tours are clunky, boring, and passé – why not create an interactive property tour engaging the user and providing a more realistic representation of the main assets of your property? A tour built around a property map and providing access to the strongest photo or video assets available allows the visitor to familiarize themselves with your grounds, buildings, and surroundings, and experience key features like your meeting facilities, spa, and restaurant.

a property tour on the Inn at Laurel Point site

the grounds tour on the Alderbrook Resort & Spa site

Photography and Photo Galleries

No matter what your website says in words, many users will be convinced to stay with you based on your photography.

If you already have a great collection of photographs, our offerings here are to integrate your images within the design of your site, and to build a robust, flexible and easy-to-use photo gallery for your users to enjoy.

If you have yet to gather a professional collection of photographs of your property, we work with various photographers around North America, and look forward to managing photo shoots so that the images work seamlessly with the concept of your website.

You can read more about the importance of photography in our article, A Philosophy on Building Websites.

great photography at the Liberty Hotel

the Bardessono's photo gallery

every page has a photo gallery at
the Wickaninnish Inn

Meeting Room Visualizer

The Meeting Room Visualizer is an interactive tool that allows users to explore the flexibility and nuances of your hotel's meeting facilities. By navigating a map of your property, users can investigate each individual meeting room and view floorplans, seating arrangements, photos and statistics such as dimensions, capacity numbers and square footage.

This tool is geared towards meeting and wedding planners, and your sales staff will enjoy how easily they can showcase your event spaces to someone who has never seen them before; it is a great step up from the traditional, static PDF download.

the meeting room visualizer tool on the Inn at Laurel Point site

with a built-in photo gallery showcasing Inn at Laurel Point meeting rooms

Google Maps Integration

Google Maps is a powerful and free tool provided by Google, and has become one of the most used mapping applications on the internet. Millions of people worldwide are familiar with its functionality.

Google Maps integration on the Bardessono website

In terms of a hospitality website, the obvious usage scenario would be a location map on your directions page, with the option for the user to input their starting address and receive a comprehensive set of directions by car, foot, or transit. Another example would be using Google Maps to highlight the attractions and activities surrounding your urban hotel.

For a great example of how Google Maps can be used to highlight the attractions in an area, checkout RateMyArea.com, a map-based search site for Dublin, Ireland.

Events Calendar

Having an events calendar is a great way to engage the audience and showcase events and activities at the hotel and in the surrounding areas. Done right, it can convey to the potential guest that your hotel is a hub of activity and a destination in itself.

We've taken what we've learned over many years of calendar integration and created a scalable, feature rich calendar application that offers centralized administration for events, chronological and category based sorting of events, multiple calendar views, quick date scanning, and more.

Because our system is built on a very flexible platform, we are able to customize each calendar to incorporate additional components like multi-user management and permissions, photo and video integration, or just about anything else you can think of.

events calendar on the Tourism Tofino website

Video Production

There are two aspects to the services we offer in this field.

The first is creating strategic videos to convey or support a message as part of a website's concept or theme. We do not produce videos in-house, but typically play the roll of art-director to a video production company's team of professionals.

strategic videos on the website for the Inn at Laurel Point

The second is integrating related videos from social media sites like Flickr, YouTube, or Vimeo into a website to provide user content and assist in viral marketing efforts. For instance, a hotel may want to showcase the family-videos shot by their guests and uploaded to Vimeo, in an effort to highlight the family-friendliness of their property.

Custom Video Players

There is always the cheaper option of using a pre-built and pre-designed tool to display your videos, but there is something to be said about having a well- designed, easy-to-use, and intuitive video player that fits seamlessly with your new website's design.

a custom video player at the Wickaninnish Inn

E-Commerce

Many hotels have a need to sell merchandise, including hotel gift certificates, as well as culinary and spa related products. In most cases a full blown, custom transactional system is overkill.

The first step of integrating e-commerce into a website is to identify just how robust an online store the client might need. While we are capable of building a custom commerce application in-house, our recommendation in most cases is to use a solid third party system like Magento or Shopify to reduce cost, speed up development time, and avoid a scenario where we are "re-inventing the wheel."

online store for the Wickaninnish Inn

Quick Facts Page

A Quick Facts page is a summary of your entire website in a single page. This is your elevator pitch.

The Quick Facts page lists useful data like contact information, location, size, amenities, and pricing, and makes sure to highlight the key selling features of your property. There should be photos of the exterior of your hotel, as well as the common areas and rooms. "Isn't this the purpose of the larger website?" you might ask. Yes, but as the internet ages, its users become more impatient. The Quick Facts provides users with the means to access all your most important information in one glance.

the quick facts page on the Liberty Hotel website

Online Post Card

An online post card is essentially a marketing tool that helps promote your hotel virally. It can be offered from your website and your hotel's WiFi / Hotspot splash page, allowing your users and guests to send an email to their friends and family before, during, or after their stay. The postcard features images of your resort and links to your website, ultimately creating traffic to your site and increasing your brand exposure.

Hotel Booking Engines

We've worked with many of the leading booking engines in the hospitality industry. This means we can offer our clients good, candid advice in choosing a suitable booking engine. We also have considerable experience building gateways and interfaces to third party systems.

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An effective newsletter campaign is a great way to extend the reach of your online marketing initiatives while furthering the goals of existing marketing efforts in other mediums.

As a business, the benefit of maintaining persistent communication with your clients is obvious, but there's more. Newsletters drive trackable traffic back to your website, so you can find out which messages scored points with your readers. You can quickly put your latest promotions in front of a qualified audience, and readers can easily forward what they see to their friends. You can also cross-market between your website and social media applications like Facebook or Twitter for greater exposure.

What sets Wallop's services apart are the following:

• Design quality of the newsletter
• Tools (highly robust suite of subscriber management and reader response metrics)
• Our expertise in designing and coding for this medium; with all the different email applications out there (Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, etc), it can be tricky
• Ideas (give us the facts - we'll figure out the best way to communicate them)
• High-level campaign management (you talk to a Wallop partner - not a junior)

newsletter subscription form on the Inn at Laurel Point's website

a newsletter design

newsletter statistics

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Facebook, TripAdvisor, Twitter, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Delicious, Flickr, Digg, YouTube. The proliferation of social media has changed the way we communicate, and the way people choose which hotel to book. There are countless opportunities for businesses to leverage this phenomenon to get their message out.

Generally our preference is to avoid a “one size fits all” package for social media. Organizations are better served by a tailored social media strategy that leverages the strengths of the business, maximizes the usefulness of their existing assets, and compliments their ongoing marketing initiatives.

Prior to making any recommendations, we spend time assessing your current situation by gathering information and completing a mini-discovery session on your social media possibilities. We will show you trends within your industry, and come up with techniques to be different and creative. A customized recommendations proposal will then be presented.

The main categories within the social media services that we offer are as follows:

Brand Monitoring and Response

Sites like Google Alerts and Technorati Watchlist allow a property to listen to what the world is saying about you online. Travel review site such as Tripadvisor, Expedia, and Yahoo Travel Advisor help you monitor what guests are saying about you, and you should have a strategy set in place for responding to the negative reviews that will inevitably appear, valid or not.

results for the Wickaninnish Inn on Google Alerts

the Wickaninnish Inn on Trip Advisor

Social Media Integration

You website should be centre of your online presence, and it should easily direct users to your brand's extensions, such as your Facebook and Flickr pages. In turn, these extensions should all point back to home: your website.

Blog Design and Development

If used frequently and creatively, blogs can still be an effective communication device for hotels. Wallop can design and build your blog, and help strategize unique ways to stand out from the over-populated blogging crowd.

Campaign Development

Creating advanced micro-site campaigns, contests, etc.

Aside from the brainpower, technical acumen, and hard work, creating a successful viral campaign takes a lot of luck. However, selectively marketing to your audience using social networking with a well crafted media campaign can be a very effective way of reaching out to potential customers. Most of the heavy lifting here is coming up with the idea. Sometimes this can be a microsite campaign, a video, or contest. After some in-depth consultation and competitve research, we'll develop a creative campaign for your audience using the most appropriate social media platform.

 

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