A & J Plant Sales
A filterable machinery listing with a page per machine and a sold archive, run entirely by the dealer.
Web design for hotels, inns and B&Bs
Every direct booking is commission you keep.
The booking sites bring guests and take a substantial cut of every one. Your own website is the only channel where the whole room rate stays with you, which makes it the highest-value thing you own.
- From £400
- Built to win direct bookings
- Photography-led
The problem
The commission problem, and what to do about it
This is the whole commercial argument, and everything on the site should serve it.
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Guests find you on a booking site, then look you up
This is the moment. They have seen you on an aggregator and opened a tab to see the real place. If your own site looks worse than the listing, they go back and book there, and the commission goes with them.
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They are checking for a reason to book direct
Better rate, free parking, late checkout, a room the aggregator does not list, the ability to actually ring somebody. Give them one, clearly, and a meaningful proportion will switch.
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The photographs decide it
Accommodation is bought entirely on how it looks. Dark, small, badly cropped photographs of good rooms lose bookings that better photographs of the same rooms would have won.
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A country hotel sells more than beds
Weddings, functions, Sunday lunch, afternoon tea, walkers wanting a dog-friendly room. Those are separate, high-value searches and they need their own pages, not a line on the homepage.
What it needs
What an accommodation website needs
Photography, a working booking route, and a stated reason to book direct.
Rooms shown properly
A page per room type with several photographs, what is in it, what it sleeps, and the view. Guests want to know exactly what they are getting.
A booking route that does not fight the guest
Whatever system you use, it needs to be one tap from every page and work properly on a phone. A booking engine that breaks on mobile is a leak you may not know you have.
A stated best-rate reason
Say plainly what booking direct gets them. It is the single highest-return sentence on a hotel website.
Structure
The pages we would build
Accommodation almost always needs the ten-page package or more, because each revenue stream is its own page.
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Home
The best photograph you own, the booking button, and the reason to book direct.
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Rooms
An overview plus a page per room type.
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Eating and drinking
Menus, times, and whether non-residents are welcome: a question asked constantly and answered rarely.
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Weddings and events
High value, long lead time, deserves proper space and its own enquiry form.
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Things to do nearby
Genuinely useful, and it earns the local searches. Not padding, provided it is written by someone who has actually been.
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Offers
Midweek, seasonal, dinner-inclusive. The lever you pull to fill quiet nights.
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Find us and contact
Parking, arrival times, accessibility, dogs. Practical questions that stop bookings when unanswered.
Work
Sites we have built
J.J. & A.W. Skeet
Surfacing and groundworks across Ryedale, York and Scarborough. Built to prove a family firm is exactly that.
Pricing
What it costs
The same published prices as everyone else pays. No sector premium.
Essential
Up to 5 pages
£400
- Designed for your business, not a template
- Every word written for you
- Fast on a phone, where most people find you
- Enquiries land straight in your inbox
- Built so Google can read it
- Domain, hosting and email sorted
- One round of revisions
Recommended
Complete
Up to 10 pages
£800
- Everything in Essential
- A page per service, so each one can rank
- An areas page, so nearby customers find you
- A fuller work section to win the job
- More internal linking between pages
- One round of revisions
Advanced
Bespoke build
£1,200+
- Everything in Complete
- Built around what your business actually does
- Filterable listings, bookings or directories
- Connected to systems you already use
- Scoped and quoted before anything starts
Need a page or two more than the package allows? We will quote for the extra pages before you commit to anything, so you know the full cost up front. See the full comparison.
FAQs
Questions from hotels and guest houses
Should we stop using the booking sites?
No. They are excellent at finding you guests who would never have heard of you. The aim is not to leave them, it is to convert the ones who have already found you into direct bookings on the second visit, where the whole rate is yours.
Can you build the booking system?
We integrate whichever system you already use, and we will be honest about whether it is any good on a phone. A custom booking and availability system is possible as an advanced build, but for most independents an existing engine, integrated properly, is the better value answer.
Our photographs are old.
Then that is the first thing to fix, before the website. Photography is the highest-return money an accommodation business can spend, and we would rather tell you to spend it there than build a beautiful site around weak images.
Do we need to blog about local events?
A small amount of genuinely useful local content works well: walks from the door, what is on nearby, where to eat on your night off. It earns the searches visitors make while planning. Recycled listings copied from a tourism site do nothing.
Advice
Worth reading
How much should a small business website cost in the UK?
Quotes for the same website vary enormously. Here is what actually drives the price, and the four questions that tell you whether one is fair.
How to get found on Google locally
The highest-return thing you can do is free, takes an afternoon, and is not your website. Here is the order to do everything in, and what to ignore.
Wix, Squarespace or a web designer: an honest comparison
A builder platform is sometimes the right answer and we will say so. But the subscription is not the real price, and there is one clause worth…