Hotel and training centre, Melksham, Wiltshire
High quality accommodation for course delegates, business travellers and the leisure visitor too.

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For 2023 (and 2024 ...) - we are now fully retired from IT training.
We have made many, many friends over 25 years of teaching about Python, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lua, Java, C and C++ - and MySQL, Linux and Solaris/SunOS too. Our training notes are now very much out of date, but due to upward compatability most of our examples remain operational and even relevant ad you are welcome to make us if them "as seen" and at your own risk.

Lisa and I (Graham) now live in what was our training centre in Melksham - happy to meet with former delegates here - but do check ahead before coming round. We are far from inactive - rather, enjoying the times that we are retired but still healthy enough in mind and body to be active!

I am also active in many other area and still look after a lot of web sites - you can find an index ((here))
20 minutes in to our 15 minutes of fame

Well - in the week of 7th January, we were on Channel 4 every day at 5 p.m. as we visited (as owners of Well House Manor) three other accommodations around the UK, met with their owners, and competed for the "Best Value B&B of the week" prize. Watched by (third party data) around 950,000 people. The busiest hour on our web site was a hundred times busier than the busiest hour in the previous month, and we were talked about on Twitter and Facebook without regard to our personal thoughs / opinions. That latter sounds worse than it is, for after starting with people not knowing us and criticizing looks and little things we were fully aware of and expecting anyway, we moved on to being seen in an almost universal positive light, especially when contrasted against some of the other players.

But now we're a week on. During last week, the shows were repeated on the "4/7" follow up channel - back to back on the Saturday, then the series came on twice a day during the week again. Following up from my blog / graphs [here], we've now complete another week and the web stats look like this:

Before the show (from 31.12.12) 252 visits in the week
(235 unique, 615 pageviews, 2.44 pages per visitor)

The week of the show (from 6.1.13) 3100 visits in the week
(2831 unique, 10250 pageviews, 3.31 pages per visitor)

Week just gone (from 13.1.13) 655 visits in the week
(542 unique, 1665 pageviews, 2.54 pages per visitor)

Graphically:


Looking at the week just gone:

and you can see the 4 p.m. repeat in the afternoons, with the show that featured Well House Manor on Wednesday spiking the most traffic, and the "reveal" show on the Friday bringing a lower but noticable spike.

As a comparison, here's the week's chart for our IT training site

Where you'll see a business to business site that's busiest during the week, and with substantial traffic all night too as the information we provide on technical subjects is valuable worldwide.

A further comparison, the same week for our First Great Western Passenger forum (by customers, for customers, NOT run or sponsored by the train company):

And there you'll see a daily pattern - little drop off at the weekend although Saturdays are always a little lower. But almost no-one there at 3 O'Clock in the morning, as it's a UK site.

So ... is the TV experience now something that's over and in the past?

No - for we have seen a second wave. People look at the show and look for the web site straight away. Then friends, family, past guests and potential guests take a further look. Many will get in touch via email / facebook, and many will post to forums and the like too if they're of that nature. Past guests who've had a negative experience with you (for whatever reason) will have been reminded, and will tend to come back even though it's months or longer after their experience, and post about their experience on Trip Advisor. This is one of the soft, negative underbelly effects of your "fame for 15 minutes".

Along that same line, if there's anyone in your past with old scores to settle, expect them to pop up. We're fortunate that we have many friends and far fewer skeletons than you might expect by our age, but we have had one pop up. I would hate to be in the shoes of the contestants who told me "a lot of people don't like us because we're successful", as I'm pretty sure that some of those people will have popped up - indeed, I have seen evidence of it on the web. And there may be those who have been there in the past, but in a very small way, wanting to jump in and take the credit. An email may give the clue; listening to others talk around the town and you hear a suggestion that your success is almost entirely due to a rather minor player from years ago!

Like all businesses, we get plenty of unsolicited phone calls looking to sell us products and services. And we've noticed that some of those are now referring to "Four in a Bed". Would we like to pay £99 to capitalise on the exposure / have our place advertised with a mention of the program in a place that many viewers see? "No Thank You" says I, and ask the caller if she had checked our number with TPS before she called.

Hesitantly, I have documented much of the curate's egg - rotten in places - as I've been asked about the follow up to the show by other contributors who's transmissions are still awaited. They're a minor part - a very minor part in our case - but they're something to be aware of.

The second wave of responses also brought the more thoughful questions - the people who run other establishments and wonder if they should apply for any future series of the program, for example. And the people who saw something at your place on the show, and would like it too. We've had questions about our orange juicer, about the monogrammed retaining bands around our face towels, and about the flowers made from old train tickets in our museum. They say that immitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and these requests make us feel very flattered.

In the lull after Christmas - first weeks back in the New Year, travel difficult through Ice and Snow, credit card bills from the Christmas to be paid, tax to be filed by 31st January - people aren't back into thinking about weekends away, summer holidays, and touring the countryside. So there's been no immediate rush of accommodation / leisure guest bookings. Perhaps people have bookmarked us and will come back to the show - we're certainly seeing a much less spikey traffic on the web site and it is up by a factor of 3 during the day, so that's something we'll see - too early to judge and worthy of follow up analysis at the end of February, and then again late in the spring.

But what's a quiet time of year in the lesiure market is the time of year that businesses are looking ahead for the next 12 months, and a number of very significant contacts from "way back" have been in touch. Enquiring about courses for which they'll be raising requests with their employers. And there have been people who have seen our technical data / presence on line in the past, require training, and now know so much more about our approach that they're going to book with us. Numbers are small, but this is our core business and the response that we've had in the area is (I'll admit) something I didn't forecast, and most welcome. As we start next week, I'm anticipating having to juggle some dates around in order to fit in all the course requirements we have before Easter (Footnote - if you're a potential delegate reading this, PLEASE get in touch as I think we're well enough resourced to do a superb job for everyone who wants a course!)

And so onwards. It's hard to come down of the excitement and buzz. It's hard not to keep looking at twitter / facebook / forums and realise with some disappointment that people have moved on to Satis House, the Yellow Submarine, Manor Lodge and Ashculme House (and next week it will be the Amber Guest Houes, G! Boutique, Taylor's Farm Retreat and the Knife and Cleaver. And it's hard not to go off into a rhapsody of telling everyone you meet about the show, at the trigger of no more than a casual comment from them. We have a good contact who tells us and everyone he meets about the day he met the Queen, and he shows them the video. We must avoid that - we're moving on providing excellent training [here] and an excellent hotel for leisure and business visitors to Wiltshire [here].
(written 2013-01-20, updated 2013-01-26)

 
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
M444 - Well House Manor - Four in a Bed
  [3864] Guest Guide for Well House Manor and Melksham - (2012-09-18)
  [3924] The bedrooms at Well House Manor - (2012-11-16)
  [3933] Behind Melksham Spa - Mood Mist over wet fields. - (2012-11-23)
  [3948] Quiet little town? Advanced Technology Centre? - (2012-12-08)
  [3962] Melksham welcomes visitors - new blue plaque trail and more - (2012-12-27)
  [3965] Well House Manor, Melksham - on national TV next week - (2012-12-30)
  [3968] Expecting nothing, but prepared for anything - (2013-01-05)
  [3970] Comparing four VERY different places to stay - (2013-01-11)
  [3971] The Experience - (2013-01-11)
  [3972] Four in a Bed - comment on results - (2013-01-11)
  [3973] Well House Manor on Four in a Bed - the ongoing story - (2013-01-12)
  [3975] Being an amateur hotel inspector helps me run a professional hotel - (2013-01-14)
  [3977] A variety of continental breakfasts - (2013-01-16)
  [4112] Really good friends - four in a bed! - (2013-06-09)
  [4138] Should a hotel accept guests who book for just one night? - (2013-07-11)
  [4147] A hidden hotel gem in Melksham - (2013-07-31)
  [4156] A further chance to see Melksham on TV - (2013-08-22)
  [4204] With the Shpigs and Donkeys - (2013-11-10)
  [4232] Not wanted here - hotel guests who will not be happy - (2013-12-30)
  [4241] Four in a Bed - the story continues - (2014-01-27)
  [4468] Four in a Bed - most popular answers - (2015-03-31)
  [4474] Effect on external factors on traffic to our web sites - an update - (2015-04-26)

G503 - Well House Consultants - Newsletter and publicity
  [48] PHP - onwards and upwards - (2004-09-14)
  [57] Posting 1000 letters! - (2004-09-21)
  [281] What they are saying about our OF COURSE newsletter - (2005-04-16)
  [336] Targetted Advertising - (2005-06-05)
  [458] Final courses of '05 coming up .... - (2005-10-08)
  [480] New look to website - (2005-10-30)
  [734] Keeping customers informed by email - (2006-05-26)
  [904] Of course I'll tell you by email - (2006-10-25)
  [1000] One Thousand Posts and still going strong - (2006-12-18)
  [1087] Telling a story in different ways - (2007-02-20)
  [1090] Too many instructions, too much detail - (2007-02-23)
  [1284] An update on the West Wilts show ... - (2007-07-30)
  [1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
  [1673] Spam Filters ... are working! - (2008-06-11)
  [1698] Dealing with The Press - (2008-07-06)
  [2051] A Presentation about our company - web and PHP - (2009-02-23)
  [2124] Building down expectations - (2009-04-09)
  [2244] What should a web site cost you? - (2009-06-16)
  [2388] `Of Course` is back! - (2009-08-31)
  [2564] Microblogging services - Plurk, Twitter, Jaiku and more - (2010-01-05)
  [2873] Another toot of the trumpet - (2010-07-16)
  [3153] Points West to Belfast - (2011-02-01)
  [3165] Journalism 101 - (2011-02-11)
  [3354] Sales and Marketing - adding advertising to the product - (2011-07-11)
  [3974] TV show appearance - how does it effect your web site? - (2013-01-13)
  [4266] Facebook marketing - who are we reaching? - (2014-04-23)

A606 - Web Application Deployment - Apache httpd - log files and log tools
  [376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
  [1237] What proportion of our web traffic is robots? - (2007-06-19)
  [1503] Web page (http) error status 405 - (2008-01-12)
  [1598] Every link has two ends - fixing 404s at the recipient - (2008-04-02)
  [1656] Be careful of misreading server statistics - (2008-05-28)
  [1761] Logging Cookies with the Apache httpd web server - (2008-08-20)
  [1780] Server overloading - turns out to be feof in PHP - (2008-09-01)
  [1796] libwww-perl and Indy Library in your server logs? - (2008-09-13)
  [3015] Logging the performance of the Apache httpd web server - (2010-10-25)
  [3019] Apache httpd Server Status - monitoring your server - (2010-10-28)
  [3027] Server logs - drawing a graph of gathered data - (2010-11-03)
  [3087] Making the most of critical emails - reading behind the scene - (2010-12-16)
  [3443] Getting more log information from the Apache http web server - (2011-09-16)
  [3447] Needle in a haystack - finding the web server overload - (2011-09-18)
  [3491] Who is knocking at your web site door? Are you well set up to deal with allcomers? - (2011-10-21)
  [3554] Learning more about our web site - and learning how to learn about yours - (2011-12-17)
  [3670] Reading Google Analytics results, based on the relative populations of countries - (2012-03-24)
  [4307] Identifying and clearing denial of service attacks on your Apache server - (2014-09-27)
  [4404] Which (virtual) host was visited? Tuning Apache log files, and Python analysis - (2015-01-23)
  [4491] Web Server Admin - some of those things that happen, and solutions - (2015-05-10)


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Special weekend at Well House Manor - come and see Wiltshire
Some other Articles
Three cheers for the staff at Well House Manor
Melksham Chamber of Commerce - join us in our future
Rail services in Wiltshire - up in the air? We need to say what is best required.
Special weekend at Well House Manor - come and see Wiltshire
20 minutes in to our 15 minutes of fame
Upcoming courses at Well House Manor - Ruby, Python, Perl
Using a vector within an object - C++
Melksham - a town of some remarkable people
Well House Manor in the snow
Extended and Associated objects - what is the difference - C++ example
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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