Every journey of a thousand mile starts with a single step - the first step to online marketing is a website. Your website is your virtual presence on the World Wide Web and more importantly, it can be a powerful sales tool. We will touch on the actual website content and how to make your website your best business tool in some of our next editions. But for now, let's do first things first - get a website.

To find website development companies is easy - to find a good one, is a challenge. Not only because there are so many companies out there, but also there is the jungle of IT jargon which you need to cut through in order to understand what you will actually get and in order to compare the services and prices between companies.

With recession being one of the most common words used in these times, it is tempting to save costs and go for a cheap solution - or maybe even get a free website. Don't. Either do it right, or leave it because if this job is not done properly, you will have wasted your time and money – none of which comes for free. On that note, a website does not necessarily have to cost you an arm and a leg, but it must cover what your business needs in order to be on top of the game and your competitors.

Think of your website as a lagoon in the World Wide Web ocean. The lagoon stands for your business (hotel), potential clients are the fish swimming past your lagoon. Your lagoon is filled with plenty of food, shelter from predators, crystal-clear waters, etc. The ocean and the World Wide Web have the following in common: vastness, depth and an immense variety of products (other lagoons). It is critical to put your lagoon on the map so that the fish can find it. You also want to make your lagoon attractive so that the fish swim around a bit. The fish will do one of two things: either stick around or go to another lagoon. And you want the big fish to stick around, come back again and bring their friends.

A website nowadays has many more components as what we actually see when visiting the site. The background work is immense and requires professional, state-of-the-art knowledge in an ever-evolving technology. A website is not a once-off task, it is a developing, ongoing project that needs to be updated regularly to keep its efficiency and function.

4 Tips to get the right website company:

- Get somebody professional - really. Invite your friends and families for coffee but not to do your website (unless this happens to be their profession). Your business is professional and this is what you want to communicate through your website, too.

- Make sure the web company understands your needs. Remember that your website is your sales tool, so theoretically the website development company becomes an extended part of your sales team. Make sure that the website development company understands your business, your needs and your goals. Find out what else the web company can do for you, such as maintaining your site on a regular basis, updating it according to the latest standards and additional services such as Google Ads.

- Use the latest and most useful technology. A website has a life span of maximum four years before you should consider redoing the website from scratch to stay up to date with technology. When creating a new website, choose a technology according to your needs, e.g. if your website needs to be updated regularly, you may want to consider getting a website based on a Joomla! template. Joomla! is a free open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web which means that you can easily update a large part of the website yourself. The user-friendly Joomla! sites are currently not only popular amongst users but also the search engines (remember, the fish need to find your lagoon). A flash site does no longer do the trick, despite that fact that it still looks appealing and the effects are nice to have; nor does a html site which requires a programmer for every change that you want to make on the site (and you will have to pay for it).

- Get a proper copy writer - SEO copy writer. It does not matter how good your language skills are - nowadays the content of the website does not only need to appeal to human beings (or fish) but also to search engines. Get somebody who speaks that language.

We hope that above tips will assist you in finding a website development company which will help you to swim on top of things. We have made many experiences with our own website and have finally found a website development company who understand our needs - and they will sort out our current website soon :-)