Earlier this month, one of the community suggested that I set up my own website to have an additional means of booking guests. I’ve thought about the wisdom of this and want to work on building the website today. May I get suggestions as to an inexpensive but nice-looking website provider? (so one that doesn’t look like wordpress). I use bandzoogle in my professional life, but it’s a bit expensive for my airbnb business. Secondly, I have a paypal account, so I can use that for accepting payments. In terms of the damage deposit, most folks want to give a credit card number and not pay upfront. Could you offer suggestions of an app or method that’s best for this? Ty.
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It’s not a deposit if the guest does not pay up front. They need to actually pay so they have an incentive to get their money back. With a credit card, what would prevent a guest from cancelling the card to avoid losing the deposit?
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Nothing wrong with Wordpress. There are plenty of free hotel/apartment booking themes (templates) and you can (by way of a plug in) integrate an iCal calendar to give potential guests an idea of availability.
In fact, out of the multitude of open source web site development platforms, I’d say Wordpress is probably the best for folks who are at the beginning of their web site development learning curve.
JF
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Vacationsoup.com has a free website building tutorial, it took me about 2 days to build mine. I use google adwords to drive traffic. www.idycabins.com
RR
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I am another one that would question your concerns about using Wordpress. It has literally thousands of templates and plug ins you can use to take online bookings and payment.
Major travel companies and multi-nationals like The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Facebook, BBC America etc have developed their own templates using their CMS and plug ins.
What is it that you don’t like about the platform @mypictonhouse?
It is one of the easiest to use CMS (content management systems) for non teccies. You can get free templates if you want and just need to pay for the web domain through one of the partners.
A badly designed website will look bad regardless of the platform you use, but a well designed website will be enhanced by using an easy to use platform.
Funnily enough, Vacation Soup uses a Wordpress plug in as their content creator!
JF
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I’m a skilled website builder. I just want inexpensive and am curious to know what other members of the community use and like. Ty.
It’s not grave. I haven’t used wordpress in a while and last time I did, it was linear-- visitors had a lot of straight scrolling down to do. Sounds like that’s changed by your positive thoughts on wordpress. Wordpress is not a strategic choice as a website for a recording artist, but the vibe I’m getting is that it’s great for our STA hosting purposes. Thanks again.
That is just so wrong.
Total album sales from that small selection? Dunno!
JF
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That’s nothing to do with Wordpress @mypictonhouse but the template you chose 
If you are going with them then do some research on the functionality of the templates you like.
I would also invest in doing a mock up using two or three templates you like and get some friends and family to test them to see whether they find it easy to find key information and give you feedback and see how ‘user friendly’ they are before choosing your template.
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That was down to the developer, not the platform.
Over the years, on a professional level, I’ve used Wordpress, Joomla, Mambo Drupal and TYPO3 and even early versions, waaaaaay back in late 2000’s allowed for making a structured web site using a menu system.
Damn, that just made instantly feel old!
JF
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@JohnF Thanks. I had a look.
I don’t want to get into a discussion about appropriateness of websites here. As a record label owner of 25 years, I have my opinions about this and don’t necessarily agree with you, nor want to get into a discussion of appropriate artist representation.
I’d like to re-direct this conversation to what community members use as their websites. Links to your websites would be very helpful. Ty.
You are; practically stone-aged 
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One less virtual Birthday/Easter/Christmas/Eid/Passover/Diwali/etc card to think about now.
JF
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I see. Ty. What amounts do others use as their damage deposits and how did you decide on that amount?
Thats fair comment. To be honest, what CMS is most suitable for whatever application is one of those circular arguments, and one I’ve had more times than I care to think about.
I’m well retired now, all my wonderful work has been replaced over the years with (in my humble opinion) far inferior work 
now I only work on a consultancy basis in Istanbul to a market even more niche than your day job!
JF
I was more inviting other community members to share links to their STA hosting websites so that I could get inspired while I build my own. Ty.
I was commenting based on a professional opinion @mypictonhouse (I manage comms and PR including project managing website development).
If I was going to proactively promote my listing directly personally I would use FB (I’ll let you know when I try it later this year how I get on).
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I have a $300 deposit, I like that on my own site and VRBO the deposit is actually charged and returned. I only once had to collect on it.
RR
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