Although I spend all my time working on websites I rarely mention ‘website’ type matters here. Just for a change I thought I’d explain briefly an addition you can make to your own holiday rental website that is very worthwhile and I have used to good effect on a couple of sites.

The big challenge with most holiday-rental websites is images. We all want to show loads of pictures of our properties, but don’t want to stop people on dial-up connections from viewing the site. So we need a way to show smaller versions of the picture, which can allow the visitor to see bigger versions if necessary. Look at page favourite photos of France for example.

Click on a little picture, and you should see a big version – you’ve perhaps seen the same effect on other websites. Well the good news is, to do this is (1) easy, if you can do file downloads, and uploads to your website and (2) completely free.

Note – you can use this on any picture to show a bigger version, not just ‘thumbnail’ pictures like the one shown here, so you don’t need to change all your existing pictures to be tiny like the one on this page.

The software comes from lightbox. I won’t explain the details of how you add it to your site here, brief as they are, because you can see them all at that site anyway. There are a couple of small changes you need to make to the files downloaded, as explained in the ‘index.html’ file that comes with the download – very simple I promise! (But see the technical note at the bottom of this entry for a possible problem when using Lightbox with Internet Explorer (IE).)

So if you want to improve the number of bookings for your property give it a try. Take some great photos, make smaller versions and larger versions, and go mad – photos all look better when they are bigger, and your visitors are only waiting for them to load when they want to actually see them, so they won’t complain either.

Note: adding it to wordpress caused some issues – the whole blog site couldn’t be accessed using Internet Explorer. Took me a few days to notice because it worked fine in Firefox. Oops sorry! I wondered why visitor numbers were down, I thought it was because of Thanksgiving!

Techie note 2: I since found the solution for the problem of Lightbox not working with Internet Explorer in certain circumstances or when other scripts are running – put the three javascript links that come with Lightbox into the bottom of the page just before the </body> entry, not in the header of the page. seems to work fine! Same should apply with using lightbox with wordpress I imagine.