Hey everyone. Brian Fitzgerald here with O’Rourke hospitality marketing. Want to do another video today and talk more about how to, how to know when you might need a new website.

There’s a lot of different reasons why you might need to be thinking about a new website or want a new website.

And what I want to focus on today is just the ability to, to make changes to your site and do that in a, in an easy and flexible way.

I can’t tell you the number of times, we, we talked to folks who don’t have the ability to go in and make basic changes to their site.

They have to go to their website partner and, and pay extra money to, to get changes made. And so I want to talk about some of the advantages of using a platform like WordPress.

And if you don’t have the ability to make some of these things, I’m going to show you or make updates to some of the things I’m going to show you again, that might be, that might be a signal that a new website is, is something you should be thinking about.

So first is just basic editing. The most basic thing would be adding a new page, right? So you should be able to add a new page to your website at any time.

You should also be able to go in and edit an existing page. By going in, you can change the page name, change the page URL.

If you need to change imagery. These are all things that you should be able to do in a, in a modern content management system, controlling certain styling, different header, formats flexibility to add optional things.

In this case, it happens to be a subtitle. It happens to be a link you can add that you can not add that more basic stuff, right?

So formatting adding a link into your content adding PDFs, all those kinds of things, adding forms in this case, we’ve added a form to this page.

And then lastly, in terms of basic editing is just, can you add more content? Now, this is, these are very specific to this particular site and there’s lots of different content layouts, but you should have the ability to add content to a page, build out a page, the way that you see fit keeping within the overall design of your site.

So basically, you know, just basic editing page edits, adding new pages, those are all things that are very important. After that, we start to talk about what we call custom post types.

And so in our world, in the hotel world, these are things like events, accommodation, types, specials wedding spaces, meeting spaces could be things related to spa, could be wedding packages, things of that nature.

And so in this case this is an instance where this property has the ability and, and all of our clients have the ability to edit their accommodations.

Not necessarily something that changes all that frequently, but let’s say you change some room or changed certain amenities about certain rooms.

You want to be able to have the ability to come in here and edit any of that information. The other thing that we allow clients to do is control the differences between sweets and guestrooms, or it could be cottages versus condos versus the N any number of different combinations of room types.

What that allows us to do is on, on the live site present all that information presented in a way that it’s filterable, right?

This allows the user to, to navigate through different room types. So through a flexible website content management system, you should have the ability to edit all of that specials as another custom post type.

You have the ability to add new specials, take specials down that then controls what’s, what’s visible on the site. Here’s how that those specials show on the live site here.

So managing what we call custom post types. So things like specials, press the room types, all that kind of stuff.

Lastly is sort of to ma maybe a little bit more advanced things, but these are things that we want our clients to have the ability to control.

So the navigation, let’s say you want to change up the way that users can navigate, or the main, the top level items, the secondary items you should be able to control all of that.

You can change the order here by dragging things around. You can remove items if you want to change up your navigation.

So having the flexibility to change those things, if you’re adding new pages and you need to change the navigation up, you shouldn’t have to go to your website partner to do that.

So editing the navigation is a big one. And then lastly is things that are more commonly, you would think would be locked, but, but in our case, we really like to try to enable this.

So for example, things in the footer, so let’s say you’ve got a new phone number, or maybe you want to change up the email address in terms of how people contact you, or maybe you want to change up the, the links that are down in the footer.

In this case, let’s say you, maybe you ha you add a new social channel. Maybe you want to add, you know, what, Pinterest or some other social channel that you’re starting to explore, having the ability to add that is something that you should have a script.

We get this question all the time. Hey, I want to, I need to add this script to my website. Great.

You can go in here and you just, you just paste it in here. And let’s say you’re trying some new Facebook effort or some new advertising partner.

You have the ability to add different header scripts, add different photo scripts to your site. So, you know, these are some of the things that we like to enable our clients to do.

If you don’t have the ability, this level of ability to be flexible and nimble with your website, again, that might be a reason why you want to look at potentially getting a new one.

So if that’s something that you are starting to explore, or we can help answer any questions that you might have, please do get in touch.