Embracing Web 2

Get some feedback on your site or ad from other rental owners and techies. Also a library of online resources so you can make DIY improvements to your web presence.
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Hanorah
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Location: Turkey

Embracing Web 2

Post by Hanorah »

Here is a sneak preview at my new site which is still very much a job in hand so critiques and tips at this point are v welcome so I can optimise it for relaunch. As you can see I am trying to embrace web 2 and wordpress mostly because of the encouragement on this site about there merits, but I may have gone too far. I will be using things like recipes/videos of the area to blog and tweet about on a regular basis to try and drive more visitors to my site and keep it fresh.

Things that still need to be done

1. Change the order of the categories at the top into a more suitable order.
2. Hide the featured category from displaying though this is needed to make the sliding pictures on the homepage work.
3. General proof reading and adding more information from my existing site especially on the things to do section. Will hold some of this back until live so I have some content to update.
4. Fix the links that are not working ie archive,feedburner. Use or remove the prebuilt ad banners.
5. Perhaps change the name of admin to my name and put a photo of me or do you think guests prefer not to know what we look like?

As we had building work this year to the back of our house I have not been pushing rentals so need to get back on track for late 2009/2010. I have put the new site on a temp URL and will change to the Villa Hanorah when ready to go. The test site is

www.dikilivilla.co.uk

I must admit I am not completely smitten with this new approach yet which is why it is taking me so long to complete. I chose it mainly because of the inbuilt web 2 functionality and liked the homepage sliding photo feature.
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Normandy Cow
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Post by Normandy Cow »

Sorry to have to tell you this, but it's not opening for me. Just get a blank white page, with a list of links to the left....
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Mountain Goat
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Post by Mountain Goat »

Neither for me (Chrome), but maybe that's Web2? Back to basics and all that?

Or were you building it offline? They look like local links.

MG
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Hanorah
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Post by Hanorah »

I did build it offline but thought I had published it to the web something must have gone wrong I wonder what? It's probably the url in the database will try and figure it out. Obviously not a WP whizz yet!
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Hanorah
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Post by Hanorah »

Have solved one problem and asked for help over another in the workshop the images are not showing now. Hopefully some one will take pity on me shortly so I can fix the problem.
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chrisj
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Post by chrisj »

Hi Hanorah

Have had a look at your site and the page source.

Can see what you are trying achieve and the look is coming along nicely but there are loads of layout and code issues which will stop your site working properly.

One of the major ones is that your meta tags are in the wrong place, they should be between the <head> tags and the first one should be a different title tag for each page. Also your list of keywords is to long, try to concentrate on a few very important keyword phrases then build these into the page content.

Pages might look better centred and it could be better if some of the text was contained at the right hand side. An over all div to contain the page might help.

The look you have is fine and with a bit of work on the technical stuff it should turn out pretty good.
Brittany Gites - holiday cottages / Gites by Jewells
Chris Jewell - Website Design Brittany
Dmitri
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Joined: Fri Mar 27, 2009 10:59 am

Post by Dmitri »

Hi Hanorah,

Great site. I am viewing it in firefox 3 and the top part with the sliding text is disjointed with text sitting on top of text. Also, I would suggest you use a subtler background. The current one is to bright and distracts from the subtle body text.
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

Hanorah, I'm experiencing same issues as Dmitri, disjointed text in the right side nav of the slider.

I'm not sure about the choice of theme as it is more suited to a magazine style site which has a lot of categorised content. The villa rental part is lost. In fact, the nav item marked 'The Villa' is at the end of the nav list; it should be the first item after 'Home'.

I've experimented with WP magazine style themes and the thing is, you need a lot of content, and that content needs to be tightly structured for these type of themes to work effectively. Just not sure this style is suited for a villa rental site.
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Hanorah
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Post by Hanorah »

Am back from my hols and have managed to sort the photos out so they should be showing not sure if this fixed the layout issues or not. Its all a bit of an experiment so I may not stick with the design and will re-read each comment thoroughly. The layout etc is part of the theme but perhaps I can tweak it with a bit more practice.

The site for review is the www.dikilivilla.co.uk one not my current one

Garri I take your point re suitability of theme and this is one of my main concerns too but my aim is to post content regularly ie recipes etc to see if it makes any difference to a more static type site and then update them on facebook/twitter. If it fails dismally I will share this on the forum so that no one else need make the same mistake.

Thanks for all the comments so far I really do appreciate it.
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