New Friday Harbor Webcam

We’ve setup a new webcam that is overlooking Friday Harbor.  Right now ( Oct 2013 ) it has a great view of the Downrigger tear-down project with the harbor, ferry landing, and memorial park included in the view. Rock Island is managing the internet connection with their downtown wireless system and it is working well enough to get us a new live image every 10 or so seconds. The wifi is a bit unstable so there are periods where the image is a few minutes old. The live image is available on http:/www.DestiCam.com and http://123west.com.

 

Friday Harbor Lodging Now Listed on FridayHarborNow.com

If your hotel, B&B, or vacation rental is on San Juan Island you can now find your business listed on www.FridayHarborNow.com in the new “lodging” section. Sherry Otis does a great job on maintaining that site with news, event updates and fresh photos. Her Facebook page has over 3,000 fans.

Why Your Contact Us Page Might be Sending Email to Never Never Land

Many innkeepers and tour operators are still making this mistake with their “contact us” page… they list an email address without a contact form. When a person clicks on an e-mail address it usually opens up the default e-mail client on their computer… this is normally Outlook express or Apple’s Thunderbird… when you compose a message in these programs and click send the message will go nowhere unless they have their POP3 or IMAP settings properly setup. Read More »

Is your website backed up and malware free?

Hi, quick note about making sure you website is Malware/Virus/Worm free and is backed up on a regular basis. We’d like to think that our webmasters and webhosts have our websites backed up…. the truth is that many do not! Remember the arm and leg you paid for your website upgrade? Read More »

Indispensable: See how your website looks & works on other smart phone brands!

See how you might be losing customers by spotting problems with your website on mobile phones/smart phones/Androids/iPhones/Blackberry by using this tool:

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Use “Cushy CMS” to update your site

You might find this video helpful if you searched for simple way to update a hotel, bed and breakfast, vacation rental, real estate agent, website. simple cms, super simple content management system for small websites like hotels and resorts… Read More »

Weebly.com … cheap & easy way to make a quick website.

I was just checking out this other online website creation tool called www.weebly.com and I have to admit that it seems pretty sweet… Read More »

Tool Review: Lucky Orange – Watch actual browsing behavior, Boost conversion rates, Optimize website usability

Here’s an app I’ve been using that lets you watch visitors interact with your website in real time showing you exactly how they are using your website. It also makes recordings of every visitor to your website so you can play back the screen recordings later. I’m probably watching you on my website right now! Read More »

Boost bookings by making sure your email is being read

Summary: Hospitality providers and tour outfitters should use their business name instead of their first and last name for all business email communications.

Time it takes to fix this problem: less than 2 minutes! Read More »

Looking for a booking form to pass revenue to GA “ecommerce tracking” tab

After watching the Google Analytics Essential Training course on Lynda.com I wondered how many of small hotels, inns, vacation rentals, and tour outfitters were accurately tracking their e-commerce data in Google analytics. The e-commerce tracking feature is a powerful tool that tells you exactly how much profit you’re making from each keyword, referring website, advertisement, or any other metric in Google analytics. It’s pretty much the holy grail of actionable statistics.  Read More »