Haagsche Suites

Welcome to Haagsche Suites.com.

This post is featured as first post for the time being as long as the move from Haagsche Suites.nl has not been finalized yet. I hope this will be the case in July or August of 2010.

What is Haagsche Suites?
It is a three suites only luxe boutique hotel (or B&B or private guest house) in a townhouse in The Hague, The Netherlands. It’s now in its eighth year of operation.

Why are you constructing a hotel website based on WordPress blogging software?
There are several reasons:

1. For over 7 years we have maintained a static site in the English and Dutch language only at HaagscheSuites.nl. This site I’ve set up my self in 2002 with the help of Willem Vos, who runs the site Weekend Hotel. It’s about time to revamp the site. To my view relaunching it as a static site would be no option.
2. For over 5 years I’ve gathered blogging experience in English as Happy Hotelier, as co author of the Dutch language Weekend Hotel Blog and at a separate blog, Chair Blog, one of my hobbies. These blogs have received recognition in their respective fields. In addition I’ve been building up rapport with numerous people from all over the world, primarily in relation to travel, both Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C). Now I would like to apply that what I have learned and am about to learn to a real hotel website with integrated blog.
3. From my blogging experience I’ve learned that hotels should adapt to social media. So rather than developing a completely new static site and – bang – launch it out of the blue, I would like to make this a more gradual process. One that our guests and onlookers can be part of. Be it by offering comments, by looking what I’m doing, or by spreading the word. Web 2.0 is about sharing, isn’t it? In a way it is a social media experiment in itself.
4. If you are running a small business as we do, you have a limited budget for your web presence. Starting the web presence of a businesses can easily be done with a blog only nowadays. You can start with hosting your blog for free at one of the free blog portals. It will save you tremendously. We had our self hosted presence already, so I’ll not be changing back to a blog portal, but replace the static site with a combined site. It is one way of showing fellow hoteliers how they could start or change their web presence.
5. The WordPress blogging platform has rapidly evolved over the past years and to my view is about ready now to take over. In addition Google is rapidly changing its search algorithms from Keywords and meta data to real time content. To stay in business and get Google and the other search engines finding you, you need to refresh your content frequently. With WordPress you can much easier do that than wit a static site.
6. I had a couple of things on my wish list for a revamped site of Haagsche Suites:
   • First: a little widget throughout the site to make online booking much easier for our guests. In our soon to be old site the online booking engine is a bit hidden and many times guest call me for explanation which shouldn’t be necessary.
   • An easier way of updating the site without being forced to be hacking around in web code each time.
   • The ability to provide more local knowledge of The Hague in an easier way
   • The ability of incorporating guest reviews in the site in a more natural way than a guest book (which is so 1990ies). In a blog guests can simply leave a comment, and search engines are likely to pick them up much better and quicker nowadays.
   • I would like to publish more photos and even -be it at a later stage- (more) video on the site.
   • I would like to have an easier way of translating content of the site without the high costs involved with hiring a translator…
   • A way of telling the (hi)story of Haagsche Suites in an easy way:
7. With the Thesis framework that I use as a theme for this blog it is reasonable easy to make style changes to the site, so we can for example start to think about a different lay out for different seasons
8. Our adventure with Haagsche Suites started already in the fall of 1999 with the acquisition of the terraced house that now contains Haagsche Suites. The official opening was in fall 2002. Both data were long before blogs – as we know them nowadays – existed at all. All photos I have from that period are still in analog form. This will induce me to digitize them and show them to you. Many of our guests appear to be curious to know our history as soon as they are over their amazement when they have entered Haagsche Suites. Stories from the past will bear the time stamp from when they occurred. So don’t look surprised if You’ll see posts appear dated with a time stamp dated long before this post.

Transition Period
I’ve started this site three or four times from scratch and have faced several server problems. I hope it will remain calm on the server front for some time now.

We had owned the haagschesuites.com url all the time. Until I created this separate site, there was a simple but efficient “’301 redirection” in place from HaagscheSuites.com to HaagscheSuites.nl: A 301 redirection means so much as when you clicked the site with the .com extension you would be redirected to the site with the .nl extension. (I will be addressing the “simple” part later)

During the transition HaagscheSuites.nl will remain our main site until I have revamped this site to an extent I’m satisfied it can take over from HaagscheSuites.nl.

Stay tuned!

Again: You will see many posts which will have an older date stamp than this post. That is because I have a lot to tell about the past. If I don’t forget I’ll ad a time stamp like this:

Last edited by GJE on May 31, 2010 at 11:02 AM

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