Yes. A content management system is so standard with websites nowadays that it hardly needs mentioning anymore - a bit like phoning your local car showroom about the car your are interested in and asking "Can I drive it myself?".  

Content is what makes a website yours and not somebody else's - the photographs, the text and descriptions, prices, keywords, etc. 

There are two ways of storing website content:-

The original way was to manually create each website page as a file on a PC, a bit like writing a letter, then uploading the finished files to the web hosting server. If you needed to make a change, you find the original file, make the changes and upload it again to replace the old file. The images & text are stored in the file itself, along with the layout and colour scheme - these were known as static websites.

The second way is to store your content is in a database and as somebody visits your website the page is built programatically with the relevant content pulled from the database and inserted into some kind of layout template, and then sent to the website visitors browser.

That's where a content management system comes in - it manages the content of a website or put another way, a database editor. If you need to make changes, add new pages, tweak your search keywords, change your prices, offer late deals, etc you log in to an admin section of your website, make the change and save it.

In a word, no they are not. No CMS is easy if you have never used one before even if the sales pitch says "easy to use website editor". The only "easy" content management systems are the ones so simple they are effectively useless. Even the two most popular, WordPress & Joomla are not simple, an entire industry has popped up writing books on how to use them.

But a CMS is not difficult to use either, familiarity of how it works and where the settings are is the main key to using one. Like any complicated object, new mobile phone, new word processing software, new TV, etc you quickly learn the basics, use it everyday, read the manual now and again and over time you become an expert. If you've added your property to a holiday listing website, sold something on eBay or started a facebook page then you've already used a CMS - the first time was probably slow going and confusing, now you now how, it's easier.

Yes, with the two property option you would have a separate page for each property and if you used the thumbnails view that has the map then your potential guests will see exactly where they are. All website can be upgraded or downgraded as required.

You don't need to do anything, your guests making a booking update the calendar automatically, it is accurate to fractions of a second. Even bookings in progress are temporarily shown as unavailable to other website visitors - it is impossible to get double bookings. The booking form has a timer which you set to timeout and release any unpaid for reservations.

The days of having to log-in to a separate calendar plug-in and manually update reserved dates are over. The single biggest grumble amongst potential guests is the lack of real time availability and online booking and payment, getting your potential guests to fill in forms, requesting their preferred dates and waiting for an email reply to request dates is so last century. You are guaranteed to lose customers if you don't have live availability and online booking. Filling in forms to request availability is not online booking, even if the menu bar said so!

No - You only need to pay the monthly flat fee - all the profits are yours.

Just set the Minimum nights value - above it is set to two. But why frighten off potential guests by insisting on making them do something they don't want? If you currently insist on a three night minimum stay and a guest is only able to stay one or two nights, they are hardly going to book 3 nights - they will go somewhere else.

We have tried to get the maximum flexibility out of pricing your nights/weeks. The price for each night/week is made from a fixed price + price per night, with selectable high & low nights. The above example has Friday & Saturday night marked as high.

By changing the fixed element you can load short stays to be more expensive than simply whole weeks divided by 7. For example if you want £1170 per week you could go with a flat rate of £125 per night, Sunday-Thursday and £175.00 for Friday & Saturday (as above, first row) - 5x125 + 2 x 175 = 1170.

Alternatively you can have a fixed price of £35 and then £120 per night Sunday-Thursday, £170.00 per night Friday & Saturday (as above, second row), both come to the same weekly total. But a one night stay for row 1 will be £125, row 2 will be £35 + £120 = £155, a two night stay would be 125.00+125.00 = £250 on row 1, and 35 + (2x120) = £275 for row 2. This ensures your major costs are always paid for.

Row 1 is how B&B and small hotels mainly charge, they generally don't have high/low seasons and clean the rooms daily.

The calendar options do allow you to charge a flat £150 per night, then add a compulsory cleaning fee of £70 for example, if you prefer itemising your costs.

The calendar does have a "week only" option which you may prefer for the main holiday season, but this "popular" feature seems more to be a legacy of poor website design than any business decision. For example if your rental cottage is in the Dordogne and the majority of your guests are travelling from the UK then forcing "week only" on them may mean they lose one or two days use of the property due to travelling. Letting them book only the actual nights they want will make them happier and the calendar will still have the sole nights still available for holiday makers travelling all the way to Spain and need a stopover.

But however you want to run your holiday rentals, the availability calendar and booking system has the flexibility to to handle it.

Every website come with multi currency as standard. For using a single currency, just disable the multi-currency option, the single currency can be any currency you like and your payment processor accepts. The default single currency is GBP but it is a simple 30 second job to change this to any other currency - just change the ISO code (GBP or USD for example) and display symbol.

For Multi-Currency this will depend partly on your payment processor and bank account, PayPal for example allows you to accept many different currencies then you convert these to your bank currency before withdrawing. You set your own exchange rates to reflect the rates you may be charged. Whether you decide to add Multi-Currency will depend on the nationality of your guests - most people prefer to pay in their own currency.

No, your subscription is simply monthly in advance. You can cancel at anytime, just log in to your account here and follow the cancellation instructions.

Once a subscription is cancelled your website will remain in operation until the current subscription expires, then automatically revert to "Closed" for a further 30 days. You can restart your subscription at any time in this 30 day period if you change your mind. After this 30 day period your domain name DNS entry and website content will be removed from our servers. You still own your domain name as before and can change the DNS settings to point to a new website host instead of us.

Maybe, but probably not immediately.

Having your own website is about converting visitors into paying guests - paid for advertising should ensure a steady stream of highly targeted visitors, that is what you are paying for. It is the Click Through Rate (CTR) you need to watch, not just visitor numbers. The CTR is how many visitors actually book. I.E. if you get 100 visitors from advertising and you pay £200 a year, but only 2 go ahead and book, then each paying guest has cost you £100. Get a better website that converts more of those 100 visitors, to say 5 bookings, then each guest is down to costing you £40 in advertising.

If you enable the integrated Google Analytics feature in our CMS then you can see how your website visitors arrived at your website - from Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) along with the search terms, or from links on other websites. If you get your SEO right and can get good SERPs for a wide variety of search terms and your Analytics show the majority of visitors coming from search engines and not paid for advertising then you can consider reducing your paid for advertising.

Google isn't fast at moving your website up the search results, it might take 6 months or more, so be patient and keeping tweaking your keywords, and that is the point of using Content Management Systems, you can alter existing pages when you like, and add new pages with more information for your guests, all the information you can't put on a holiday listings website:- What can they do, where can they go, how to get there, where to eat, shop, attractions to visit. Find all the annual events that occur in your area.