Content is key to your success. The theme/colours/fonts are secondary.
This - and with knobs on!
Websites are the direct descendants of old-fashioned direct mailings and magazine ads. If you want to sell something, you must primarily mention the customer - the words 'you' and 'your' should be in almost every sentence. "Your experience" "your holiday" and not eight paragraphs that only tell me about the company and how great you are! The last and ninth paragraph gives the poor old customer three grudging mentions.
Bad copy - "Our instructors and guides have the highest levels of mountaineering qualifications recognised throughout the UK (AMI) and abroad (IFMGA)."
Better copy - "Your guides have the highest levels of mountaineering qualifications recognised throughout the world."
But here's the kicker - despite mentioning yourself dozens and dozens of times, I still know nothing about you and your team. You and your team remain strangely anonymous! A simple 'About Us' page with photographs would cover it. (I looked and found your 'About Us' page and it featured just one person!)
Here are two books on how to write good content - 'Making Ads Pay' by John Caples. Caples wrote what is possibly the greatest advertisement of all time that was headed "They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play . . ." He wrote that long-copy magazine ad over 100 years ago and it is still studied (and copied!) today.
The second book (and more contemporary) is 'How to Write Sales Letters that Sell' by Drayton Bird. He learned his trade under David Ogilvy and today heads his own agency that specialises in writing persuasive copy.
(Another very inspiring book is by Sergio Zyman called "The End of Advertising as We Know It!" He was head of marketing at Coca-Cola and is another marketing expert who emphasises the importance of actually making sales and producing a profit.)
Fancy websites and are full of 'creative design features' seldom sell. Websites that extol the virtues of the company but fail to mention the customer and the benefits to the customer seldom sell.
If you look at the great websites that dominate their markets and wipe the floor with the competition, they are all bland and just brutally functional. No fancy animations, no clever design features, no pop-ups, in fact, nothing that gets in the way of the customer finding whatever it is that they want. Google, Amazon, eBay, YouTube - brutal functionality.
