Show HN: We made a tourism bureau site for our village in South Africa | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We made a tourism bureau site for our village in South Africa

10 pointsmorog9 comments

Greyton is a popular holiday village in the Riviersonderend mountain range in the Western Cape South Africa. At the entrance to the village what was once a thriving tourism information office that existed on accommodation bookings commissions was pretty much bankrupt by Airbnb taking over most accommodation bookings in our village. Like many places in the world, houses were being bought by outsiders to put on Airbnb.

Significantly lower income for the tourist office meant it had to reduce its marketing activities for the village, offer shorter opening hours which affected the service it offers providing hiking & mountain biking maps and advice on routes, accommodation & events info & booking and helping many a traveler out who has run out of petrol (there is only one petrol station that is often empty, same story with ATMs)

We decided to make a Wordpress site in our spare time and we're pretty happy with it.

Take a look - would appreciate any comments, suggestions, insults, etc

https://greytontourism.com

Some quick feedback:

* The website is slow in general

* These links gives 404: https://greytontourism.com/directory-categories/food-drink/ https://greytontourism.com/directory-categories/retail/

* A link to the Admin dashboard is visible on some pages

* Your e-mail doesn't have a mailto link

* Your telephone doesn't have a tel link

* Your address doesn't have a map link

* Your search interface is very heavy

* The calendar for booking any accommodation is extremely slow and cumbersome. You will loose many of your potential bookings because of this. Always make it as easy as you possibly can for customers to spend their money. Don't get in their way.

* The green on white text is hard to read

The website design is nice and friendly, and inspires confidence. It seems like a nice town to visit!

WordPress is not a good platform for your goals, you will probably be better served by a normal HTML/CSS page and using Surreal CMS or similar for day-to-day updates.

Good luck!

Thanks for the all the critiques that is very valuable feedback.

wrt choosing Wordpress - it certainly does have a lot of drawbacks like you mention, our reasons for going with it:

1. There are about 10 web designers in our town, they all use Wordpres...Wordpress runs just about every small -= medium site in South Africa, so if I fall under a bus theres someone to pick up the (website) pieces

2. We had a very broad set of requirements - event ticketing with seating plans, accommodation booking with calendars, payment processing, members directory with subscription and free options. Since this was very much an 'after-hours' project we needed fairly plug-and-play functionality.

3. Low budget for hosting - this site needed to run on a shared server that already had PHP / MySQL

But thanks again for the tips, I will review them with the team and I'm sure we can get most sorted! (the broken links were Wordpress permalinks misbehaving...oops)

Regarding speed - we have done a fair bit of optimizing Litespeed cache and reducing the unnecessary scripts that get loaded but yea its still slower than we would like. Also since we are not using a CDN, if you are far from South Africa latency will be a big issue.

All the best & greetings from Greyton!

What a chance!

Greyton was one of our favourite spots on the SA road trip.

I randomly picked some airbnb I liked on the route and that's how we ended up there.

We were surprised how charming little town we found. Sadly we didn't have time to stay longer.

I highly recommend it to anyone visiting South Africa and I recommend SA in general. Apart from like 3 spots we didn't feel unsafe. Top beaches, amazing wildlife, mountains, food, nice people. I would like to return some day and explore west coast more.

Now I've read the section about airbnb. I am sorry to be part of the problem but for someone from the other side of the world it's really hard to book with sth else.

You should work with town council to regulate & tax airbns, imho they should stay but you should extract some value back to municipality and local people.

That's fantastic you visited Greyton! no worries about AirBnb, everyone uses it - not just international visitors. We used to rent a room on Airbnbn (maybe you stayed with us even - near the mountain :) and we've certainly travelled plenty using it.

Greyton is definitely a hidden gem, for some reason it's not on many travel itineraries with most people doing a long one day drive from Cape Town to the Garden Route - but its without doubt the best village in the Cape, decent facilities & restaurants, fast Internet, lots of English speakers (if thats all you know!)

I don't know what the solution is wrt Airbnb, for someone planning a trip around a foreign country it offers some element of security and a lot of convenience...everything gets booked in one place. But for many small towns a tourist info office is more than just a place to pick up a map and its a social / emergency / Internet connection hub of many towns. Taking away the accommodation booking commission means that they can't operate or just get replaced by a sign board and some flyers that you can pickup at any petrol station anyway.

Greyton is fortunate in that there are lots of events, festivals, marathons & MTB races to sell tickets for and keep the office open, and it's close enough to Cape Town to get the short stays.

Next time you come, book your stay on GreytonTourism.com - insider tip, there are some unlisted, exceptional properties that can be booked...just send Ros an email on bookings at greytontourism dot com!

The website design is very cool, the images are fantastic.

Thank you! glad you liked the site

The website looks beautiful and best wishes.

Thank you! glad you like it, best wishes from Greyton!

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