Hotels Must Embrace WordPress and Join the Open Source Revolution

Our tragic hero (that’s your hotel) finds itself locked into a contract with an internet marketing agency that forces you to use a subpar, overpriced, proprietary content management system (CMS). It’s clunky, confusing and costly yet is sold to you as the greatest thing ever invented. In the name of having full control of your content, you end up with something that takes away more than it gives.

Anytime you ask for some additional functionality, you are told, “That’s not possible” or “That will cost you $X,XXX.” Custom CMS systems make your website bulky and hard to manage, damage your SEO rankings, and may even hurt your online revenue. To make matters worse, when you decide to leave, you’ll discover your marketing and design agency has saved the worst for last. One of several possible bad scenarios follows:

1. You are not given anything. Their custom system is “irreplaceable” and for some reason doesn’t belong to you even though you paid for the site. You’re forced to go into a browser and copy the entire site, which then has to be re-coded in its entirety by a new agency.
2. You get a single file. Your entire website is zipped and given to you as an attachment. Years of work summarized in an incomprehensible zip file. You will have a hard time decoding this file and launching your website again. Plus, SEO optimization is almost always removed, images are mislabeled, URL’s are broken… the horror list goes on.
3. You get the entire custom CMS. Good news? Not really…your website now has a CMS that will never again be upgraded, updated or patched. It might work for a while but, like anything else, it will fall apart over time.

Whatever happens, you’re guaranteed to lose whatever site credibility or rankings you’ve achieved over the years, because now you’re starting from scratch. Perhaps the site developers used some unusual .CFM URL extension or you’ve been building rankings on a URL unique to the CMS, which no longer exists. Either way: poof! Your online standing vanishes and your direct revenue declines.

It’s time for hotels to get smart about their website investment and embrace open source technology. You cannot build your best online revenue channel using proprietary technology. It’s just not worth it, no matter how tempting the offer to go custom might be.

WordPress for Hotels – Embracing Open Source

Let me state it plainly: let proprietary content management systems go the way of the dodo.

• They cost more.
• They’re less functional, and you’re dependent on your vendor for any enhancements.
• They’re difficult to implement and use.
• They generally suck.

Enter WordPress. Some of the best websites on the planet use the WordPress platform. It’s come a long way from being a blogging platform. The argument that it is not sophisticated enough to handle a hotel’s website is invalid. WordPress is used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites. It powers the likes of the New York Times, CNN and Wired Magazine. I think your hotel’s website should do just fine.

Here is why WordPress should be your next – and final – hotel CMS system:

It’s Easy

The first great thing about WordPress: you can use it. You don’t have to rely on experts to do everything for you. Sure, there’s a learning curve – but it’s a lot shorter than for proprietary systems, and there are self-help resources aplenty across the web. You don’t even have to know HTML to use WordPress – its integrated WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editor makes word processor-like functionality a snap.

It’s Extensible

Then comes the awesome functionality. In its early days, WordPress was just a blogging platform. Over time, this functional extendibility has transformed WordPress into a mature content management system.

Since WordPress is open-source, anyone can program for it. The result: as many themes and plug-ins as you could desire, at a much improved price point (often free). And “plug-in” is the right word: you just upload your desired module to the site, and bam! You’re in business. Thousands of plug-ins already exist – and many target the needs of the hotel and hospitality industry.

• Booking
• Mapping
• Translation
• Analytics

What’s really cool: If your desired functionality doesn’t exist, you can still hire someone to program it for you – at a fraction of the cost. Why so much cheaper? Pure supply-and-demand. If you’re using a proprietary CMS which only a single company knows, they can charge whatever they want. But with a ton of developers who can program in WordPress, simple market competition brings the price down.

It Makes Mobile Sites Simple

2010 was officially The Year of the Mobile Web. With WordPress you can create a mobile site virtually automatically. Their clever themes and plug-ins will take your main site and translate it into mobile-friendly layouts whenever someone visits from a mobile web browser. Better yet, whenever you update the main site, the updates show up in the mobile version – with no additional effort!

It Has Built-In Search Engine Optimization

WordPress makes it simple for Google to index your site, and you can easily make sure that pages and posts are optimized for your desired keywords. Specialized plug-ins – like All-In-One-SEO, etc. – take this functionality even further with little extra effort from you. Whenever you create new content, you can instruct WordPress how to communicate with search engines – for example, whether a given page should be indexed, behind-the-scenes SEO coding, adding tags, etc.

Open-Source Support

You get more than just the CMS. You can find lots of free support and resources from the developer and communities of users. WordPress also updates regularly… again, for free. This is one of the easiest ways for hotels to join the open source revolution.

(If you’re interested in reading more about open-source, check out our March 2011 Newsletter).

ROI

It’s very hard to go wrong with WordPress when estimating the value it delivers. You’ll spend less money and time on installing, maintaining and developing it.

For some software needs, we wouldn’t be so point-blank in a recommendation. Which booking engine we might recommend, for example, depends on your needs and resources. But when it comes to hotels, why would you design your site in anything else but WordPress?

Be brave, be bold and be free.

So if WordPress works so well for hotels, how do you put it to use? Stay tuned for our follow-up post: WordPress Best Practices. Subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up-to-date with every efficiency tip we publish.

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