Should your website or blog have a privacy policy? Why would you want to have one? Are there any laws that require a privacy policy? Do small businesses (like bed and breakfast inns) need a privacy policy? What should my privacy policy include? Having a privacy policy is not something most small businesses think about when they think about content for their website. But should they? The short answer is yes.

Recently we posted about a very significant decline in the amount of referral traffic we had observed coming from BBOnline.com. Several innkeepers posted in the comments, some noticing similar drops. Some, like ours, have been enormous, while others have been “only” 40-50% (during a time when referrals from most other directories have increased!). We have not heard from anyone who has observed anything other than a significant drop in referrals.

Some years ago we had a conversation with a BBOnline staffer who indicated that a website redesign was being planned, but it could be quite some time before it was completed. At the time, BBOnline was one of the most significant sources of traffic referrals to our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast, so we were anxious to see the site updated, and also to see some more modern features added, such as innkeepers uploading their own photos, changing their own text, etc.

At the Google Analytics sessions at the PAII conference in Little Rock this year, as well as in some online discussions on the PAII Forum (and elsewhere), innkeepers have occasionally commented that they feel they “have to” use Google Analytics, but they really don’t want to use it. This post reviews some of the complaints and gives (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) thoughts about them. Throughout the post, we’ll be looking only at the “New” Google Analytics interface (the one with the orange bar running across the top of the page, below the Google Analtyics logo.

We recently saw an innkeeper commenting that they were overwhelmed by all the things to look at in Google Analytics – too many choices, and no clear idea of which were the important things for them. When you can’t devote the day to studying the data, what do you really need to know, and how can you focus on that quickly and easily? Google Analytics is a powerful tool – no question about it.

Mainstream news and social media blogs have been filled with articles on Facebook’s new Timeline for Brands (available now, but mandatory by the end of March, 2012). So why another article? This post is designed to provide a simple guide to the steps you need to take to get ready, and to do a good job of it, without getting bogged down with all the “nice to have” extras, or full feature lists, that others have reviewed.

If you’ve experimented with Google Analytics, you probably know you can set up and track Goals with it, but two things can make it challenging – (1) how to track goals from your site through the booking process, which usually takes place on a website managed by your booking software company, and (2) how to set up your goals so they are useful. Just to add to the confusion, Google has recently updated Analytics, changing the way you track from your site to the booking engine.

Would you know if your site had been hacked? Could you restore it if it had been hacked? These three steps will help you prepare for the worst. If you follow technology news, it seems that high-visibility websites are being compromised (hacked) with astonishing frequency. Even to the point where at least one hacker group is using the threat of its hacking as a political weapon. You might think that big sites, like major corporate sites or government sites, are so well protected that they can’t be hacked.

As busy innkeepers, we know that time is at a premium, so poking around the various Google Analytics menus and reports is not only daunting, it is time-consuming. What is needed is a shortcut – a way to set up an overview with just the most important information, so you can check it in just a glance, when you don’t have time for a deeper analysis. That is exactly what we’ll do in this article.

Our review of the current version of RezOvation GT was published January 24 (during the 2012 Innkeeping Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas). At the conference, RezOvation invited current users to see a preview of the upcoming release, and to provide feedback on some of the anticipated features. We attended that preview, spoke with some of the RezOvation staff, and have some notes to share here. At the outset, the staff stated that the goal with this release was to give it a feel that would be very familiar to existing RezOvation GT users, while making it much more intuitive and much easier to use.