The problem
An elderly business owner, based in Germany, from a rural farming village in Punjab, North India. He will not mind us saying that he is very illiterate when it comes to tech (as most people from his generation are) and is a non-native English and German speaker.
Online bookings had slowed to a trickle and the restaurant owner had issues with keeping track of their current and scheduled bookings and which ones he had already confirmed. Upon investigation we could see that their website was built decades ago and implemented a lot of practices which are now considered to be harmful to SEO.
Further to that we discovered that the current 'booking system' was essentially an insecure form with poor usability sending an email to the owner. The owner was then manually writing bookings down in a paperback diary and replying to customers personally by email to let them know their booking was confirmed.
Compounding the above issues was the lack of any real development resource within the business and the lack of funds to hire any internal development resource. The majority of vendors he contacted were quoting astronomical fees for solutions which included features which were either not needed (such as a blog) or required regular maintenance to keep the business's core information (such as opening hours) up to date.
The solution
We rebuilt his website using modern techniques and integrated it with our 'Managed Web Presence' service. In doing this we removed the need for any of his team to update the website when the restaurant changes its opening hours, thanks to our auto-updating functionality.
We then created a simple bespoke booking management system which enabled him to easily confirm or reject bookings by clicking a button from a confirmation email. The booking management system also allows him and his team to log in to a portal where they can see information about all upcoming and previous bookings. To further assist him with his day-to-day management of capacity we set up a scheduled email which alerts him to the coming day's bookings every morning.
The result
From tedious manual labour to complete automation.
- More than 100% increase in bookings
- Countless hours saved in admin
- Sleek and easy to use website
- Complete fix for all Google Search crawl errors
- 25 indexed web pages
- More than 1,500 web search clicks per month
See the Prince of India project for what the site does today.