It will be easier to unify the ‘look and feel’ of the Sandcastle Cottage website with the 2crail.com website if I use stylesheets based on the same layout, but using different colours and backgrounds.

So first step is to download the basics of a stylesheet which I like, then work on it to change the colours and so on. I’ve found some coding on a website which gives me the basics – good to credit another blogger!

First step is to create the stylesheet, then change the colours to match the existing stylesheets for the 2crail.com website.

Rats! Just when I thought my new website which I’d designed specificially for short breaks was going to be ready and open for business, I’m confounded by the size of the block for an ad in Google Adwords – their spec for the URL length says it has to be less than 35 characters long!

So: http://www.short-breaks-near-st-andrews.2crail.com won’t be any good. Back to the drawing board….

Next thing to try – a short ad on Google. So sign up for a Google Adwords account, and get the (golf) ball rolling. It’s the Dunhill Cup 5-8 October at St Andrews, so it should still be possible to pick up a rental for some short breaks around then.

Put £10 per month into my Adwords account. I don’t know if this is too stingy, but I don’t want to run up huge bills doing this until I feel much more comfortable with the idea.

short breaks near st andrews – great idea for a blog.

Sometimes I drift around with ideas circling in my head, but I don’t get focused and concentrate on the task in hand. This happens a lot!

There are always practical things needing done and taking up time, and weeks can go by where I spend time washing, ironing, supermarket shopping, tidying, reading, cleaning the flat, attending two different book groups, supervising homework, shuttling children around, planning how to occupy the next school holiday, walking with my walking friends, swimming with my swimming friend, organising the group of Edinburgh Self-Caterers to which I belong, thinking up ideas for the group of Crail Self-Caterers – oh and so many things which divert attention from my small business. And of course when other people for whom I’ve done websites like Lorna, or Jan or Matt and Sally ask for changes or amendments, then I of course rush to help them first because they’re my customers. So my websites get neglected, and my marketing suffers.

Then one day last week, a chance correspondence with a fellow member of the ASSC, John Winkler leads to an exciting exchange of views and tactics. John’s been very active in encouraging members of the ASSC to exchange links to each other’s websites. I’d added two lists of links to the Sandcastle Cottage and Sandcastle-in-the-City websites which John was having difficulty finding in his constant quest to ensure that those of us who’d said we’d participate actually did so. He’d e-mailed me to ask me where I’d hidden them and I’d been a bit short with him in my reply – sorry John! However, it led to him asking me ‘how’s business?’. An innocent enough question. I hope he doesn’t now regret asking it.

John owns a holiday cottage in Scotland too: Bayview – a holiday cottage on a lochside near Glencoe. He is very active in marketing it and using the power of the internet to attract visitors from all over the world to visit Kentallen.

He’s been working on building links in to his website from many other sites, and says that he’s currently got 182 links in Google, 232 in MSN, and 131 in Yahoo.

You can check how many links your website has by typing link:www.sandcastleholidays.co.uk into Google (or the other ones) Search (of course you use your own URL). But I didn’t find much that way, and preferred to click on the Advanced Search tab on Google, and search for the phrase www.sandcastleholidays.co.uk which gave me some hope that we at least had some links somewhere! I need to spend a bit of time now checking how my websites fare with this. I’ll post the results as another blog.

Spent some time yesterday morning checking out some key word searches for other operators who are offering short breaks or self-catering near St Andrews.

Did the search on Google, and picked out a few sites from their first 10 returned where I thought it might be useful to look more closely at the sites and examine their tactics, keywords, descriptions, etc.

Keyword Search: short breaks near St Andrews
Returned these sites of interest:
www.Scotland-holiday-cottage.com
http://www.standrewsalbany.co.uk/fife.html
http://www.braeside-standrews.co.uk/links2.htm
http://www.rufflets.co.uk/short_breaks/

Keyword Search: self catering near st andrews
Returned these sites of interest:
http://www.coastal-life.com/st_monans/
http://www.woodlandholidays.co.uk/
http://www.castawaycottage.co.uk/

Keyword Search: short break self catering near st andrews
Returned these sites of interest:
http://www.eastneukescapes.com/Pages/Prices.shtml
http://www.scotland-inverness.co.uk/standrews.htm

To take a look at the keywords for each of these sites I have to use Mozilla Firefox as my browser, because it allows you to View – Page Source and look at the coding which has been used to create each page.
I’ve kept an Excel spreadsheet containing the keywords and descriptions for these sites, which I’ll refer to later when I am ready to develop my own site.

Our company, Sandcastle Holidays (Scotland) Ltd is going to try to improve the number of days which our cottage, Sandcastle Cottage, Crail, Fife is let each year.

The reasons for this are:

* Fife is a wonderful part of the world. We’d like to share its delights with more people.
* Sandcastle Cottage is a great base for holidays but we’ve focused on the summer weekly lettting market, and have neglected other opportunities to let the cottage all
year round.
* Although we bought the cottage for a number of not very specific reasons back in 1992, we need to make sure that the cottage pays its way and that we generate enough return to pay for improvements which will ensure that our standards are high and guests want to come back year after year.

We’re a small business and want to use all the tools which the internet has available to us to promote our business.