Starting this month, we're adding a page for every town where a cottage is listed on My Favourite Holiday Cottages. Researching and writing a few hundred words describing around 700 towns in the UK has ensured the lights in the office have been burning long into the night.

You can find the Town Search page on the main menu bar, the sidebar and advanced search pages. We've also upgraded the drop-down search bars to show how many cottages are in that town/county/location to aid bookers in homing in on their desired cottages.

New pages help bookers find cottages more easily, and they also mean new traffic, allowing us to send more bookers to your website.

We're still uploading town pages, so if the town where your cottage is located doesn't yet appear, don't fret - it's still being written and will appear as soon as it's done.

We've enhanced the appeal of the site to users. When

Planning a last-minute seaside holiday but don’t want to be overrun by the crowds? Here are six ‘secret beaches’ and recommended holiday cottages in the coastal counties of Devon and Cornwall. Of course, it’s impossible to find a beach so secret that no one knows about it, so I picked out those that look lovely, are somewhat off the beaten track and are recommended by locals, who instinctively know the best beaches away from the main drag on which to chill out on a summer’s day.

Lee Bay nestles on the rugged North Devon coastline between Ilfracombe and Woolacombe. Lee is one of those ‘time forgotten’ villages where you could be forgiven for believing you’d slipped through a time warp back to the 1950s as you descend through sleepy Lee village in the valley towards the beach.

The Bay has two equally appealing faces: at High Tide, when the sea laps against the sea wall, and the turquoise colour

First things first: We haven't put our prices up!

Better still, we are giving a choice of 3 ways to pay when you next renew your annual subscription. Two of them will save you even more money.

Login to your members' area and select the 'Renew' or 'Buy New' subscription button.

Select the 'Subscribe and Save' button and choose your preferred options:

1: Pay £12 every quarter

2: Pay £22.80 every six months (5% discount)

3: Pay £43.20 annually (10% discount)

NB: All figures are net of VAT.

Once you've set up your payment, all subsequent events will be automated. You won't be deluged with renewal reminder emails from us and must spend time wading through PayPal each time a payment is due. We'll send a single email to let you know we are about to take the money via PayPal, and only if you decide to cancel will you need to do anything.

Alternatively, you can renew for 24

It's a jungle out there! But, with some insider knowledge, you can find your dream cottage at a reasonable price and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing your holiday is safe and secure.

We've compiled this list of eleven handy tips to help you get what you want with less hassle and even less expense. Use it when searching My Favourite Holiday Cottages for your dream holiday home and other sites we're also happy to recommend as purveyors of good practice like us.

1. Focus

Set your search criteria. There are so many lovely holiday cottages in the UK, and there'll be oodles that'll meet your criteria, so focus, focus, focus! Don't get overwhelmed by casting your net too widely. You'll spend hours searching for a perfect cottage if you do. Set up too broad a search, and you risk wasting your lunch break trawling through pages of unsuitable cottages and losing the

Next week, we will make major changes to your member area to make navigating and amending your property’s listing easier. Log in to view the changes, and if you have a moment, send us some feedback.

We’ve also upgraded our Map Search. It now features better controls and street view, and the “pin” can be placed more precisely. Why not log in and put it on your welcome mat? If you ever need help making amendments to your listing, do use the ‘Live Chat’ function if it is live; it’s usually online from 9.30 am – 9.00 pm during the week and frequently at weekends.

We recognise that half of you have more than one property. We’re introducing a new, more generous series of discounts. From now on, you can enjoy the benefits you get when signing up for more extended periods and better discounts for uploading two or more cottages. You can also directly upload up to thirty cottages. This ensures

Here's an interesting fact: 92.6% of people say that a website's immediate visual impact is a major factor in deciding whether to book a property.

Colour plays a crucial part in that influence! So, is your website the right colour? If not, your holiday cottage could be losing the bookings it deserves.

Read our latest blog article, How to Use Colour To Increase Holiday Cottage Bookings, for six of the best tips for you to use when updating or redesigning your website. Feel free to add your comments related to your own experiences.

Last month, we explained how to use the free Late Availability function. This month, we are drawing your attention to the 'Location' function.

Every cottage on My Favourite Holiday Cottages is listed by county. But is your cottage listed under one of the many UK locations or regions that potential bookers use to

If you were web surfing in the wee small hours of Wednesday morning or first thing before breakfast, you might have noticed that the site was offline for a few hours while we rebuilt our server. This is part of our ongoing maintenance and development programme to improve the site's speed. The faster the site works, the more search engines like Google will like it. If you weren’t aware, this was happening. Hopefully, it was because the larger part of the downtime was during the early hours of last Wednesday morning when traffic figures were at their lowest. Although the site was back online by late morning, we have automatically added two days to your renewal date to ensure you’re not out of pocket.

We are also revising the subscription renewal process to simplify it. As I write, Jason, our Web Developer, is playing in PayPal’s Sandbox, a virtual world where you can create and test new ideas to see if they’ll improve upon

In a recent conversation with an owner phoning to renew his subscription last week, he described My Favourite Holiday Cottages as ‘The site for savvy owners’.

Naturally, we invited him to explain his reasoning. He thinks we are one of the few sites in town that prioritizes click-throughs or referrals to his website over enquiries, saving him time and money. His view is that the more people that visit his site, the more genuine/high-quality enquiries he is likely to get (far more than coming from an advert).

Then (he said), enquiries from his site convert to bookings more often than those from an advert. Aside from the fact that a website offers a more trustworthy source with more information, he feels it is also because enquiries from an advert are from people sending out the same message to lots of properties at the same time. He’s fed up with spending hours replying to duplicated enquiries, only for

We noticed a healthy increase in online bookings from owners' websites. That's good news for those MFHC subscribers with an online booking option, as we aim to drive potential bookers to your website and encourage them to book from there. As one of our subscribers told us, "I'm away in January, so I cannot answer the phone to enquirers, but with my online booking facility and plenty of visitors to my site, I'm not losing any bookings." If you don't have an online booking function on your website, you may wish to consider it. We'd happily offer some advice. We'd happily provide some guidance if you want further information on this subject. Ask here about online booking facilities.

This month, we've been looking into the world of Instagram. If you haven't heard of it, Instagram is a popular photo-sharing app you can use if you have a Smartphone. Anyone using the app