Show the actual units
A page per cabin, with real photos, real sleeping arrangements and what is genuinely in the kitchen. The single most common reason someone leaves a resort site is that they cannot work out which cabin fits their family.
Resorts & rentals
They pick the lake in February. Your site has to be awake then.
A family in the Cities decides in January, looks in February, books in March and arrives in July. Every one of those steps happens on a phone, on your website, months before you unlock the office.
What a rental site has to do
Five jobs, and only one of them is looking nice.
A resort site is not a brochure. It is doing specific work in a specific order, and most of the ones I get sent fail at step two.
Answer the price question
Nightly, weekly, by season, whatever you actually charge. A site that hides rates until you call loses the people who were never going to call, and that is most of them.
Say what is around you
Which lake, how far to town, where the good fishing is, what there is to do when it rains for three days. This is what people are really comparing when they compare two resorts.
Make enquiring easy in February
A form that works in the off season, goes to an inbox you actually read in winter, and gets a reply. Half the resort forms I test do not deliver anywhere at all.
Load on one bar of signal
People check your site standing in a driveway, or from the lake with terrible reception. Hand written pages load in about a second. A builder template with twenty photos does not.
Never look abandoned
The killer. A page still showing last year's Memorial Day banner in February tells a planning family you are gone. The seasonal guide covers this properly.
Honest answer
You probably do not need a booking system.
This is the thing I get asked for most and talk people out of most. A booking widget makes sense when you have enough units and enough volume that the phone is genuinely the bottleneck. Below that, an enquiry form and a phone call is better, because a conversation lets you fill an awkward Tuesday-to-Thursday gap that a calendar widget would leave sitting empty all season.
If you already run a booking system, I will wire the site into it. If you do not, I will ask what problem you are solving before I sell you one, and sometimes the answer is that you do not have that problem yet.
Questions
What resort owners ask me.
How much does a resort website cost?
A new business package is $699 if the resort is under a year old, and a custom site with a page per cabin or package starts at $1,495. Where yours lands depends on how many units you are showing and whether you want online booking. The number is fixed in writing before work starts and it does not move afterwards.
Do I need online booking on my website?
Often not, and it is worth being sure before you pay for it. Plenty of small resorts do better with a good enquiry form and a phone call, because a conversation lets you fill an awkward gap week that a booking widget would leave empty. If you already run a booking system I will connect it. If you do not, I will ask what problem you are trying to solve before I sell you one.
Can you build it in the off season?
That is the right time to do it. Between roughly October and February you can actually look at proofs and answer questions, and the site is finished and indexed before the February planning weeks when families are deciding. Building in May means it lands after the decisions are already made.
Send me your site and I will tell you what February sees.
Free, in writing, within 24 hours. I will open it the way a family in the Cities would and tell you exactly where they would give up.