Getting Started With Your Sierra Website Theme
Congratulations and thank you for choosing our Sierra Website theme. We hope that it proves to be a valuable marketing tool for your business.
To help you get the most from your new website, we’ve put together a series of articles that explain how to manage all aspects of your website.
Your website integrates closely with the 365villas application. Anything relating to your properties (search, bookings and property details) are managed from within the 365 application. Changes you make to your property portfolio along with associated bookings are automatically updated on your website.
Items managed from within your 365Villas account:
Property portfolio. When you received your initial training of the 365villas application, you will have been shown how to add and edit the property details within your portfolio. When you add a property, the information that you add into the property profile, including: property description, local area information, property amenities, availability etc, are automatically displayed on your website. In addition, the following elements are controlled from within your 365villas account:
- Property profile. From the property settings tab you can manage the profile of each individual property. Your website automatically syncs with the following data fields:
- Property name
- Photo thumb, used as the primary / default photo
- Property description
- Local information
- Property video – if you add a Youtube url, to a video you have uploaded to YouTube, a video link will display below the property description and open a popup video.
- Max number of guests
- Number of bedrooms
- Number of bathrooms
- Latitude and longitude, used to power the location on Google maps.
- Table rates. We display the rates that you set for your property in the rates tab, under property information
- Payment policies, Payment methods, House rules. We display everything that you add into these sections under the property information, policies tab.
- Photos. We display a gallery of all the photos that you add. We recommend photo dimensions being 1920 x 1080 pixels at 72dpi.
- Amenities. We display the selections that you make here including:
- Essential settings
- General amenities
- Bathroom amenities
- Bedroom amenities
- Communal amenities
- Dining amenities
- Kitchen amenities
- Living area amenities
- Miscellaneous amenities
- Surrounding area amenities
- Other amenities
Please note: To see and be able to set the amenities above, we recommend keeping room specific amenities blank (ie leave as ‘select room specific amenities, with nothing selected) and then you will see the list above.
- Booking engine. From this section, we use the following
- Colour scheme. This is used to colour your calendars.
- Calendars and online booking. Sierra uses the Camelot suite calendar
- Search engine. Scroll to the bottom and we use the information in the ‘customise your search criteria’
- Search engine.
- Featured properties. From the portfolio manager section of your website you can select and add the properties from your portfolio that you want to feature on the homepage of your website.
- Customer reviews. We recommend that you leave the maximum to display at no more than 10
- Currency settings.
- Property Groups (used in search by category). From the portfolio manager, you have the option to create property groups. This is a useful tool as it enables you to group your properties in a logical way eg by area. The resultant groups are then displayed in the search widgets across your website (search by category). To create groups, click the + icon and give each category a name. Click ok to save the category. Then click edit the category, which displays a list of your properties. Click to move across the properties that you want to include within this category. When you have finished with your groups, the categories will display in the search widgets.
- Property Discounts & Promos. Configure dates for automatic discounts or create promotional codes to use at checkout.
Items managed by your website’s Content Management System (CMS)
Your WordPress Content Management System and the industry-leading theme builder, Divi by Elegant Themes, manages all other aspects of your website. Between them, they enable you to:
- Personalize colours, fonts and styles to brand your website
- Add, edit and delete individual pages within your website
- Update the main navigation, drop downs, side navigation and footer navigation links
- Add, edit and delete the text content across your website
- Add, edit, delete the images across your website
- Add, edit delete social media links
- Customise or add contact forms
- Configure maps for your own/other locations
- Publish or schedule News and Offer posts
- Manage the meta data for your website (including page title, h1 to h5 titles, page descriptions and image alt tags) used by search engines to help rank the pages across your website.
In a series of step-by-step articles we take you through the full setup of personalizing your Sierra Theme.