Hotel Blogging Best Practices, Part 2: Essential Design Elements

This is part 2 of my hotel blogging best practices series.  You can read part 1 here.

Once you’ve selected your blog publishing tool, the next step is designing the blog layout.  With an overwhelming number of designs available, what factors should you keep in mind?

Here are some essential elements to include on your hospitality-themed blog:

• The ability to receive updates – not everyone is going to keep coming back to your blog, so you must make it easy for them to receive new posts by other means.  Here we provide RSS and email updates through Feedburner.
• Integration with social bookmarking services – this is another topic for another post (tomorrow), but you can increase traffic by adding social bookmarking links to the end of each post (like I do here)
• Search function – this is basic, but make it easy for visitors to find specific content
• Topical archives – again, organizing your old entries by topic is more helpful than organizing them by date
• Clear affiliation with your hotel – as a marketing tool, your blog’s #1 purpose is to increase reservations.  Make links to your hotel obvious, but not obnoxious.
• Traffic tracking software – not a design element, but essential for any website.  I recommend Google Analytics.