Historic site, stately home, manor house marketing.
Ben Smith writes about bringing all areas of the public to your historic site, stately home, manor house or garden
For custodians of the nation’s heritage, while their work is largely about preservation and research, it is also a fact of modern life that even our valued ancient monuments and historical sites must contribute to their own upkeep, they must attract visitors, they may also be eligible to attract charitable donation and they may wish to offer merchandise associated with their property for sale. The website can offer help with all these areas. View our Bristol Web Design Portfolio.
The all but unlimited use of images on modern websites and the ability to keep adding pages allows us in partnership with curators/owners/directors to build an informative, interesting and visually appealing core site. Good photography capturing every detail and mood of a historic place – images from all attractive viewpoints in all seasons and all times of the day can produce a mouth-wateringly appealing shop window. Such a site will make people want to be there right now, or as soon as they can be, to experience the real thing.
To help increase foot fall, as well as offering the basics about opening times, entry fees, facilities, accessibility, directions etc, your site could offer pages with an historical angle offering archive and research information, or in the case of a garden, for example, could offer some quite serious horticultural information all of which attracts an interested target audience to your site. On the other hand, the same site can have pages that appeal to families offering information about your shop, events, your café/restaurant, dog walking and child friendly facilities. If you are in a position to host events at your property, pages can be produced to attract those who may be looking for a place to host their wedding, special birthday party, antique fair or to use as a backdrop for classic car rally or photo-shoots. These types of events are good ways to make money for historic sites if they have the capacity to handle them.
We understand about designing websites including a version gives all the essential information mobile devices, to capture those potential visitors who are out and about and looking for something to do. We can hand you a website that you yourself can populate and update by use of easy to use content management systems. Your own words and images can be uploaded simply and published in seconds. The website, your shop window to the world on the internet, is a wonderful way for you inform and interact with the public. You can advertise special events, such as Christmas fayres, Easter egg hunts, summer concerts or plays etc. news and promotions. These types of posts not only advertise your events, but additionally, the fresh copy also keeps your site interesting to the search engines. To get your historic property ‘out there’ you can be assured that we are fully conversant and up-to-date with all coding, SEO tactics and other electronic marketing methods. We will create and then nurture your on-line presence for you.
We can make your site ready to respond to prospective customers. This is not only helpful because prospective visitors can make contact you effortlessly either by telephone, social media or via the site itself, but it also allows you to set up an on-line / eccomerce web design shop. This might to sell anything from tickets to events at your property to selling merchandise associated with it. You can also have a page asking for donations and legacies and facilitating this, if your property is in a position to accept charitable donations.
Don’t forget that you can use your site to look for staff and we can help you with SEO to ensure that the site appears in the various areas where specialized staff/contractors from talented and appropriate curators, ancient building restoration specialists or horticultural experts, to event managers, catering personnel and serving staff will be looking for employment.