I should have written: Beware of Bullfights Ticketing Services.
I’ll be in Madrid during La feria de San Isidro so it will be the perfect occasion for me to attend to a corrida (I won’t be a part of it for those who care!). I don’t know if I’ll like that, we’ll see!
While I was trying to buy tickets from www.taquillatoros.com, I realized that the form was not secure. Second time in a couple weeks that this problem happened to me, last time story is here : Online secure reservations.
Taquilla Toros is a partner of Ticket Master so I really had to go further to understand what is going on since I was sure Ticket Master pays a lot of attention to security. Finally, they do have a valid SSL certificate but since they didn’t use HTTPS to link to the form, it wasn’t secure.
What about you? You bought a SSL certficate but do you use it properly? ; )
It appears there are still hotel/hostels/tour operators who do not care about security on the Internet… or ignore the importance of it.
Los Amigos Hostel in Madrid ask people to fill their credit card information in a non-secure form while making their reservation. You can see it by yourself at: http://www.losamigoshostel.com/b/english/reservations_sol.htm. I don’t know where goes the credit card information but it doesn’t make me feel safe about it.
What should they do? They should either:
- Stop asking credit card numbers in this form.
- Buy a security certificate (SSL certificate) from Thawte, Verisign or from another provider. Install it on the server. And change the URL from http:// to https://.
- Ask people to reserve via GOMIO.com, hostelbookers.com, hostels.com or another online booking services company.
- Use PayPal Website Payments Standard to do the transaction for you.
You would not let the waiter in a restaurant tell everyone your credit card number, your online customers neither…
Stéphane from Amomenti wrote an I-guess really interesting book. If you read French, go get it… or buy it online!
More info about Promote.
As I always say, the 80-20 rule is what you should focus on. It applies perfectly to usability.
I’m actually planning a trip to Spain (lucky me!). Since I’m trying to get the better price for my plane ticket, I’m going thru a lot (and a lot!) of airfare websites. Some of them are well done but some others made me so frustrated! When tourists are looking for tickets, a car to rent, an hotel to book, they most of the time make a lot of searches on each websites. You can imagine how frustrating and discouraging it is to be slowed down by usability problems. You want tourists to buy tickets from you, then be sure that it is easy for them to do so. Happy experiences will also make them come back next time!
Here is a list of usability problems that you should fix quickly in case of an airfare search form:
- Customer should not always have to fill the form and he wants to change a date or a destination.
- The most used item (for example : a dropdown list of years for a leaving date) should be selected as default. We are December 28th 2006. Why is “2006″ the default date in the dropdown? Sure we are in 2006 but 99% of people are searching for 2007!
- Calendars are cool but please give alternatives. Calendars are good for some of the customers but for others it is simpler to write down the date directly.
- In the French version of your website you should use the french names of the countries/cities in your lists.
- If someone is accidently searching for past dates do not launch the search process for nothing. Tell him right away that the entered dates are not valid.
In conclusion, I would suggest you to use your own forms from a customer perspective, you’ll see that it is not always easy to use. ; )
If you consider using Google AdWords to drive people to your website, here are the 3 steps you should follow:
Step 1
Take a deep breath.
Are you ready now? Okay…
Step 2
Wait!
Step 3
Answer to this question:
Did you Optimize your Website?
What are you waiting for? A good keyword strategy, some html modifications and you’re done. It will take a couple of weeks to see the results.
Okay now, here are the AdWords tips you should follow according to Google, I think these guys are right (haha).
- Identify your advertising goals.
- Organize your account for maximum effectiveness.
- Choose relevant keywords and sites.
- Create straightforward, targeted ads.
- Optimize your website for conversions.
- Track your account performance.
- Test and modify your campaigns to get the results you want.
All these tips are important but I would insist on the last two. For some of you it’s obvious but measuring and modifying your campaign depending on the results you get is how you will get the maximum out of Google Adwords for your money.
If you want more tips or you want to discuss about your next AdWords campaign, write us!
A quick post to give you the link to Five Rules for Great Websites as described by James Archer of Forty Media.
Here they are :
- Challenge Assumptions
- Provide Rich Content
- Make it “Sticky”
- Bring a Pro
- Love your Website
- Build your website accordingly to the reality of search engines (as Michaël suggested)
Via lesbonnesfrequentations.com, a French blog on which I wrote as well.
According to this article of Radio-Canada, Quebec City Tourism is pretty slow this summer.
I’ve made some requests on Google Trends and here is what I got for “Quebec tourism“. I bet you can see that 2006 is not gonna be a good year for “Quebec tourism” searches on Google.
Well, we do not have enough data to be sure of anything… but that’s a good indicator of the relation between Internet traffic and tourism industry real data.
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About Google Trends
With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
Google Checkout
Google launched Google Checkout this week. If you have an email account, you can fill out the form on Google Checkout. Now on, you’ll be able to buy stuff from Google affiliates in one click. Secure, fast and easy. All that everyone wants. You should take a look at the demo video.
And if you want to use it as a seller, here is the Merchants page.
Suppose that you offer guided tours of London for tourists. Your little business built a website that is doing a fair job, but when you go on Google (or any other search engine) and you search expressions like “london guided tours”, “london city tour”, etc., your website isn’t well listed.
After reading this blog, you optimized as much as you can your web site for search engines. Good work. A few weeks later, you go back to Google to test if your modifications helped. Good job, you’re now on the second page… but you realize that all sites on the first page are big players.
Now you have 2 things to do.
1) Obviously, you got to continue optimizing your website.
2) Try to take advantage of the ranking of the big players.
Some of them are competitors, nothing to do there. But what about the others?
- London information website
- Blog about London
- Tourism association
- Top 10’s of things to do in London
- …
Depending on each site, you could try to get in touch with the owners and to get an article about your company, get included in link directory or anything else that could bring visitors to your website.
2 advantages of doing that :
- You get more visitors.
- There are more links pointing to your website. That helps gaining in notoriety so it could also help to get a better position in search engines.
You have a lot of spam and you heard that it is probably because your email address is written on your website? You’re probably right. “Clear” email addresses can easily recognized by robots. Those robots crawl the web looking for email addresses to stock in a database… and eventually send spam to it.
Be smarter than the spammer
You can avoid you email address to get “stolen” by encoding it. By using an email encoding service (free) you can encode your email address and use this encoded string in your mailto tag instead of you real email address. It is not 100% guaranteed, but it worth it.