Today I want to talk about usability of your vacation rental site. Usability is exactly what you imagine when you hear this word - the science of how to use your site. It is also a science of behaviour of visitors on your site. The more you know about your site’s usability, the more sucessful your vacation site will be, more rental inquiries you will get.

You probably wonder why would you need to know about usability for your vacation home site. Simple - it is a an art to bring visitors to your site, but it is a greater art for them to get interested, come again and eventually book your vacation home. As you feel this is a far subject from SEO, I want to assure you, this is something that will pay off on the long run!

As for any science, there are certain known studies. When visitor comes to any site first time, he/she tends to “scan” pages - not read or browse them. The visitor will have about 5-7 seconds to analyze if this is a site they need and if they can not confirm it right away, they leave and may be never come back. Guess what? We just lost our potential renter.

Here’s few MUST for your vacatin rental website to have:

• Home page MUST be very clear about the purpose of the site
• Home page MUST have location of your vacation rental
• Make very easy to understand labels for each page (Calendar, Contact, Pictures)
• Make information such as rates, contacts are clearly accessible and very easy to read
• Don’t have any misleading information on your vacation rental site
• Don’t post any links to any un-related resources or any other websites that  has no relevance to vacation homes
• Make sure each page has an easy to understand title, so if gets bookmarked will be easy to find (Blue Ridge GA luxury cabin - rates)
• Create good printable version of your vacation rental - this way if they want to have information to be printed, they will have good resource to analyze your rental home
• If possible, make an ability for them to email your site to friends and family - vacation rental hunters are mostly family people who will look for approvals from others.
• Always allow to send you an email - preferably not a text link, but an image or a form. Most of visitors will want to call you right away.

few comments about above. Use more obvious labels all the time. I’ve seen “Virtual Gallery”, “Look inside!” and similar labels instead of simple “Pictures”.  Make your site a professional looking site. Many studies point now that Internet users are more sophisticated then before - they naturally want presentable sites.

Test your vacation rental site in bother Internet Explorer and Firefox, you will be surprise how site that was just so nice in IE will look ugly in Firefox or vise versa.

Happy booking!