Hello everyone,
I'd like to have you thoughts about the idea to get for your hostel a responsive website for the cost of one night per month. Alternatively you can get free months in exchange of 2 free nights in off season for some backpackers friends.
I imagine you spend much money to design and develop a website that does not even rank top in Google and might not be optimized for mobile while > 40% of travellers search for hostel on their smartphone those days.
Thanks for the feedback.
Florian
9 years
Hi Florian. Could you clarify your question for me? Are asking about offering free nights in the hostel in exchange for the website (like work exchange) or do you mean the relative price of those nights in order to put the cost of the website in perspective? Or were you offering an either/or possibility? Either way, it sounds pretty affordable. Have you already made any websites for hostels, or are you just checking the level of interest?
9 years
Hi Florian,
I develop/update/maintain websites for hostels whilst travelling, let me share how most hostel managers/owners work with this.
When the topic of websites is discussed, and the hostel I'm staying at has a relatively old website (ie. You see room for improvement) then they are often very content with any help they can get. Internet/Website related aspects of running a hostel are often a bit of a untouched area due to a) unfamiliarity with web development and b) high costs of hiring web developers.
Depending on the amount of work I quote them a 'price'. This price can range from free accom during the development to purely financial rewards or a combination of both.
In my experience, staying at the hostel you're working for has some great advantages. You get a good feeling about the place and have a very close feedback loop with the owner/manager.
I assume what you're aiming at is that you'll build and manage the website for a certain price a month, which you have pegged at the price of a bed in that hostel? It might work, not sure how hostel managers feel about this. In general I'd say if a room is anywhere between $10-$30 dollar it would still be a good deal for them. I'd recommend to keep things simple and just go with standard pricing structure rather than working with bed per night prices, free months for free nights for friends etc; it makes things unnecessarily complicated!
Let me know if you (or anyone else!) have any questions, always willing to help out.
9 years
A lot of hostels offer free nights for guests who can translate all or part of their website, or who are willing to do some guest blogging, etc. Completely designing/rebuilding a website seems like quite a bit more work than that.
The price of building a website (and the quality of that site) can vary greatly depending on the region, the talent of the developer, and the needs of the hostel. If a hostel operator is actively looking into building a site, then they will probably have some idea of the local costs associated with the project. This will definitely help them to put any barter price into perspective.
I agree with backpackerdigital that setting a standard price for the work rather than using equivalent bednights would be much easier to calculate and evaluate both for you and for prospective clients.
9 years
Completely designing/rebuilding a website seems like quite a bit more work than that.
Totally agree. This sort of thing is not recommendable.
Think about every bad tourism website you have ever visited (there is no shortage). It's all nice and well to GET a website, but to keep it updated for future technology updates, Google updates, maintain it in Wordpress... is a legitimate hassle.
All those people with bad webpages were initially happy with their sites. What happened between then and now?
It's what happens after you launch which is the real question! Does a site slide into the realm of broken/barely functional websites, does it stay maintained (not much better) or is it actively improved and adapted?
This last thing is why I actually got into the business of tourism web design, to solve that problem, but in a sustainable/affordable way.
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