What a homestay website in Nagaland actually needs

A guest planning a trip to Kohima or Mokokchung will probably find you on their phone, often on the road with a weak signal. They want to know three things: what the place looks like, what it costs, and how to get there. A good homestay website answers those quickly and gets out of the way.

It opens on patchy data

Many of your guests will open your site on mobile data somewhere between Dimapur and the hills. A slow page is a page they close.

That means:

• photos resized for phones, not uploaded straight from the camera
• no video or heavy slideshow playing at the top
• fonts served from your own site, not from an outside service (that is how we built the Eden Academy site)
• words a guest can read before every picture has arrived

A WhatsApp button, where a thumb can reach it

Many guests would rather send a message than fill in a form. Put a WhatsApp button near the top of every page, with a call button beside it.

You can usually skip the contact form. It is one more thing for the guest to type, and one more inbox for you to check. On the Eden Academy site, enquiries go straight to the school’s WhatsApp, and there are no forms to fill in.

How to reach you, in plain words

A pin on a map helps, but in the hills the road a map suggests is not always the one a local driver takes. Write the directions as you would give them on the phone:

• from Dimapur railway station, and from the airport
• how guests usually get to you: shared taxi, private taxi, or your own pickup if you offer one
• a landmark near the turning, and what your gate or sign looks like
• where to park

What guests should know before they arrive

Answer the questions you already get every week, once, on the page. For guests coming from outside the state, the most important one is the permit: Indian visitors from outside Nagaland need an Inner Line Permit. Say so plainly, and tell them where to apply.

After that, the everyday questions:

• check-in and check-out times
• whether breakfast is included, and what other meals you serve
• hot water, Wi-Fi and parking
• how guests can pay, and whether you ask for an advance
• your house rules

Photos of your real rooms

Guests book what they see. Show each room as it is, in daylight, with the bed made and the curtains open. Add the view, the dining area, the bathroom and the road up to your gate.

Leave out stock photos and pictures of places that are not yours. A guest who arrives to find something different from the website will remember it.

A part you can update yourself

Rates change, a room gets redone, the festival season fills up. If every change means calling a developer and waiting, the site goes out of date and guests stop trusting it.

At Eden Academy in Mokokchung, the school office posts notices by adding a row to a Google Sheet. The site reads the sheet every time someone opens it, so a new notice shows straight away, with no developer and no waiting. A homestay can use the same idea for its own notices, such as rooms being full for Hornbill or a road being repaired. The Eden Academy case study shows how it works.

What you can skip

• A booking engine, if you confirm every booking yourself by phone or WhatsApp anyway.
• Pop-ups, sliders and background music.
• A blog you will not have time to write.
• Long pages about your philosophy.

Where we fit

We build fast websites for homestays, schools, clinics and shops, then keep them up to date on a monthly care plan. Your domain, accounts and data are registered in your name, so they stay yours, and on the care plan small changes are done within two working days. We meet clients in person in Dimapur, Kohima and Mokokchung. There is more on our websites page.

We are also building Reception, a WhatsApp assistant for hotels and homestays. It is in development. It is designed to answer guests from a fact sheet you fill in, with its own sections for getting there, check-in, house rules and the Inner Line Permit, and to note booking enquiries for you to confirm.

If you want to talk about your own place, message us on WhatsApp.