Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

We’re starting to get a fair number of hits on our Dutch pages which is a good sign, though generally speaking the Dutch tend to search in English. It was a doddle to get the pages translated (I’m sure the Dutch is dreadful though!) and I’m planning on doing the same exercise for Portuguese over the next week or so (so far we’ve had nobody from Portugal at all so perhaps this will pull in a few punters). It’s certainly a bit weird to have our dutch transport page listed as number one when you search for “ryanair girona” in google.nl !

I’m still plugging away with the winery/vineyard site, aiming to add a couple of photos a month of their activities during the year. The direct hits on both pages are starting to mount up as the pages get larger and the ranking is definitely up there: search for “winery perpignan” and it’s the top listed site! We’re wondering when we’ll get the first order via the site (they’re already getting phone calls originating from it).

Now that this year’s website refresh is nearing completion, I thought that I’d put a toe in the water and see if I can pull in any webdesign business from other people, so as of last week, Crystal Consultancy made its debut. It’ll only be a winter-time activity though as we get too many customers from about June to September to be able to do anything other than the hotel. Amazingly, there are only 31 webdesigners listed for the whole of France so we’ll likely pull in a few punters (that’s down to most people only using automated submission to the search engines so I’m sure the real number is much higher). The site’s live now and should be listed by google within the next couple of days with yahoo following a few weeks later.

The Spanish course is going fine so far. I try to do it each morning before doing anything else. If nothing else, the Spanish from years ago seems to be coming back to me in bits & pieces.

We had a run to Herault (near Montpellier) during the week to see our new accountant. She’s pointed out another bunch of mistakes that our soon to be former accountant had made over the course of the year. A “just in passing” remark of hers highlighted just how bad he was: he managed to register us in a way that wouldn’t have let us employ part-time staff which is the only way we’d have probably been employing people. On a much more serious note, due to him having done nothing at all following the initial meeting in February (in spite of him having quite a long “to-do” list), the mortgage cannot be treated as a business expense. We’re not sure of the full implications of this as it only sunk in after we’d left but I think that it means that every single mortgage payment we’ve made over the last year will count as income and therefore be subject to tax; if that’s right it will inflate the cost of the mortgage by something like 50%. The only way around that would seem to be to reregister the ownership of the place in the French equivalent of “Mas Camps Ltd” but then that’s going to run up something like EUR 20,000 in notary fees (well, mostly transfer tax).

Anyway, we’ve sent a note off to the soon to be former accountant informing him that due to the mistakes he has made, we no longer require his services and will be calling to collect our file from him on Monday afternoon. I suspect that we’ll be seeing him in court at some point to recoup the money that has been lost as a consequence of his incompetence.

The weather here seems to be starting to get back to normal. It was raining quite a lot over the last week but when it isn’t it’s very warm: definitely t-shirt weather and verging on shorts weather. Going by what the neighbours were saying the other day, this month is a bit hit & miss weather-wise but next month sees a more consistent improvement.

We’re going to have another go for the TVs this week. There’s an offer on at the moment which’ll let us pick them up for 69‚€ so we’re going to pick up five or possibly six of them (although I think that we’ll pick up one or two as a trial first). At the moment, two of the rooms are wired for French/Spanish TV and we have the bits & pieces to put satellite TV in one other room. However, we know that we can extend satellite TV to one other room quite easily. The gite and room 5 are problems though and we think that we’ll have to cable them up specially due to the thickness of the walls.

I’m toying with the idea of branching out into website design and a few other related things for the Winter months (assuming that I can get a few punters with cash burning a hole in their pockets).

Anyway, what do ‘yall think of Crystal Consultancy ? Would you buy a used website from these people?

Any thoughts on the level of charges? (or indeed comments generally: this is definitely mark #1)

Well, finally, I have found a way of getting the pages into a semblance of Dutch.

Unfortunately, this has the immediate consequence that I now definitely need to do something about the language bar as it’s taking over the pages. The longer term knock-on effect is that sooner or later I’m liable to get an e-mail in Dutch. We’ve already had this problem with the Spanish pages: just got an Austrian writing in slightly iffy Spanish enquiring about the apartment so I had to reply in my even iffier Spanish.

Yes, folks, we appear to be within sight of the promised land of a French Child Benefit (Allocation Familiale) payment. At last, courtesy of a phone number that Colin acquired, we have prised a little note out of the Child Benefit people back in Belfast to the effect that they stopped paying us on July 12th. We’re looking at getting on for 3000‚€ of back payments.

We had a little trip up to see the people at the Auberge du Balestie near Carcassonne. They took over last June so, in theory, we’re running a few months ahead of them. In some ways we are, for they’ve not really gotten into getting listings on reservation systems yet whereas we’re running out of new places that we can be listed on. On the other hand, their restaurant is miles ahead of us and we’ll likely adopt a few aspects of it that we’re quite taken with over the coming months. Basically it reflects a different emphasis: at the moment we are essentially an accommodation provider that has a restaurant, whilst they are a restaurant that has some accommodation.

Our website is way ahead of them, of course, but then that reflects the fact that we’re not paying for the web development and have therefore ended up with a website of a scale more befitting something with several hundred rooms than our somewhat more modest establishment. In fact, we’ve yet to see a hotel, no matter how large, that has a website remotely approaching ours: no doubt you guys will email me straight back with one though!

Technically, we have (or had: we’ve yet to nail that fact down!) two stars whilst they didn’t inherit any from the previous owner. It’s difficult to say what our respective rating would be at the moment as we’ve both been upgrading things since we took over. Their restaurant is clearly better than ours in terms of appearance and ambiance whilst we’ve been luckier with our rooms. In practice the differences will be gradually diminishing over the coming months as they’re presently upgrading their rooms whilst we’re intending to up the ante with our restaurant so it’s anybody’s guess what the rating would ultimately be.

It looks like it will be useful for us to get together now and again as they’re coming at the hotel business from a different starting point and we’re looking forward to their critique of our setup on the return visit.

On the website, I’ve just finished a complete refresh this evening so if ‘yall all have a look I’d appreciate comments on the new style. Not radically different from last month but it is quite a change if you’ve not looked at it for a few months. Notable additions are that we’re now up to six languages on the hotel and transport pages (the hotel pages are very basic for Catalan, German and Italian at the moment but will improve); there are page navigation buttons on the english, french and spanish hotel pages; there are site navigation buttons across all of the english, french and spanish pages; the “book now” button features on the english, french and spanish hotel pages; and I’ve added google ads to all but the english hotel page. I’d particularly appreciate comments on the placement of the “reservations” button.

Tomorrow we’re off to see about getting the front wheels aligned and to book the car in to get the radiator sorted. I don’t know why, but they won’t do any work on the car without seeing the log book (carte grise) so I’ll have to hunt that out this evening.

Dug out a translation someone did of part of our little brochure a while back and now we have the main pages in SIX languages. Impressive, or what?

Well, the list of flags sure looks impressive to me. Sadly, three of the languages are fairly basic (German, Italian and the new one, Catalan) but we actually get hits on them. All being well, the google link on each will produce a few more cents income (from a standing start less than a week ago, we’re up all of 40c so far).