Another website in need of constructive criticism

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JChrisP
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Joined: Sun Sep 05, 2010 10:51 pm
Location: Casperia, Italy
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Another website in need of constructive criticism

Post by JChrisP »

I have been managing our casa vacanze just north of Rome via long distance (and a wonderful local caretaker) for four years, and am delighted to have found this site. I have been lurking for a while, picking up tips but not participating much, as most of you sem to have vastly more experience than I do.

In any event, I am about to update our web site, correct a few links that are broken or dated, etc. But before I do I would really like feedback of any sort:

www.rentcasperia.com

Grazie, in advance.
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CSE
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Location: Galicia

Post by CSE »

Hi Chris and welcome to LMH...I know Chris from a good travel forum.
I will kick this off with some comments about the coding for the website;
There is no robots text file.
There is no site map file either.
There are some coding errors.
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1 ... ria.com%2F
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/vali ... ria.com%2F
This is for the first page other pages have slightly differing amounts of errors.
I cannot find alt attributes for any photos either.

My overall impression of the website is that the text is slightly on the small size; Maybe expand the centre “div” to accommodate this and to fill the screen just a bit more.
Maybe a change to the listing on the left by making sure the house details is the first link to hit.
The photos in the album are slow in loading.
The overall colour scheme of the website is good and I feel it is in keeping with the house (from the photos that is).

Details;
You do not give details of the additional, one-time cleaning and administrative fee is charged on each rental. Does your rental prices include VAT.
Maybe add a GPS cords for the parking area, as these are becoming increasingly commonly used these days.
There are loads of links to other websites and as far as I can see they all open up in another window so your website remains open to your prospective customers.
The website is full of information about the area and gives a good impression of what one can do in that part of the world.

I hope this helps and that others will make some comments too.
Never try to out-stubborn your guests.
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Jimbo
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Location: Charente Maritime

Post by Jimbo »

Hi Chris

I like your property very much and your atmospheric photographs. However, many of the pictures are too dark to be read easily and the interiors often show strong warm colour casts (both easily remedied in editing software like photoshop). I like the 'photos' picture mosaic but the pictures are slow to load. I also find the mosaic confusing because it dodges from long shot to close up and back again and I would much prefer a 'journey' - either gradually working your way in - or 'the reveal' where you start with a close up and slowly pull back to those sumptuous mountain shots.

It is a stunning property and would benefit from a large photo presence on your website. Just needs a bit of structure and a bit of photoshop editing to help the viewer get the best from your lovely images.

Jim
lorca
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Location: The Axarquia, Spain

Post by lorca »

I agree that your property looks stunning (as does the town, I´d love to visit) - but although you do have a picture of a view from a window, the overall feel is that the property has no natural light. Most of the photos seem to have been taken at night - very beautiful and atmospheric, but at least one picture in daylight would help.

As an aside (a petty point sorry) but is an en suite half bath a room with a toilet and basin ? Would be helpful for any non-American potential guests for whom this term does not compute.
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vrooje
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Location: Burgundy, France

Post by vrooje »

Welcome, Chris! I'm glad you jumped in. With four years' experience, I'm sure you have plenty of things to say. :)

First, I agree with Jimbo and lorca's critique of the photos. Some of them are gorgeous, some have the potential to be, and others could stand to be re-taken. Are you allowed to use the NYT photos in your own publicity, outside the PDF? Some of them would make good substitutes for the darker photos you have, at least until you can take more yourself. (I think your photo of the lower bedroom is better than the NYT's, though -- I prefer the camera angle.)

I actually don't think lorca's point about using US English is petty at all. We've discussed it before here, and though it was years ago it's mostly still valid. I think we also discussed it in later threads, and one option people came up with was to use all the useful terms, separated by slashes or parentheses. So, your kitchen has a cook top with a (4?-2?)-ring stove/hob. Your master bedroom has a US queen/UK king memory foam bed. If your market is entirely American guests, maybe you shouldn't worry about it, but if you're also targeting other English-speaking countries, it's worth thinking about your language (and probably worth registering the .co.uk domain at the very least).

(Aside: someone please correct me if a US queen is not equivalent to a UK king! That's the language I use.)

Your photos load quickly for me, perhaps because I'm in the US and your site is hosted in the US. But you could reduce the load times by compressing the large photos a bit more. They all seem to be over 300 KB.

I haven't had time to read your full copy, but I'm finding it a bit difficult to get started because your paragraphs are very long. Is it possible to break it up into smaller paragraphs so that it's less intimidating? I know it probably sounds silly, but it's easier to read 500 words as five paragraphs than as one. And it's important to do everything you can to keep potential clients from deciding that reading your site is too much work! So, use short paragraphs where possible, and bulleted lists can also be your friend, especially when describing, say, kitchen amenities.

casasantoestevo makes a good point about alt tags (another opportunity for SEO, along with title tags, which you are using) and I agree that you could be using a larger div. Google recently increased the size of its logo and text box, which is probably a sign that we all can think of doing the same. Yours is about the same width as Google, and ours used to be too, until we realized that only a few percent of our site visitors actually needed our page to be that narrow. So we moved one size up, which enabled us to fit more photos and text above the fold. And the vast majority of our visitors still have a significant border on either side of our content. The number of visitors who don't is decreasing every day.

I do have a couple suggestions regarding your menus. You have a lot of information on your site and the menus are readable and understandable, even the ones in Italian. I have recently been convinced that top menus are preferable to left menus because they take up far less real estate, so you might consider switching to top menus.

But even if you keep them at left, the same menu should appear on every page. It makes sense on paper to omit the link to whatever page you're on in the menu for that page, but in practice it confuses people to do so. You should have a link to your home page on every page, even your home page. Plus, if you have one menu, you can keep it in a separate file and use an include statement to show it on all your pages. That way, if you ever change your menu, you only have to change it once and the change will show up across all your pages.

One last thing: I'm not sure I agree with the advice about putting your GPS coordinates on your website. I think it's a great idea to give them to your clients, but as an off-site owner, I'd hesitate to put anything on my website that would give everyone on the internet a map to the front door of my property. That's partially to protect against break-ins, but also to protect the privacy of the guests.

It's so easy to jump right into the critique and not say anything positive, so let me make sure to say that you have a spectacular property and your website is very good. It's just that websites can always be better! :)

(Aside 2: I wonder if you'd be willing to satisfy my curiosity: how were you picked to be in the NYT? I've often wondered how they select the subjects of their "Great Homes" pieces.)

Sorry this is so long... hopefully it was readable! If not, make your paragraphs shorter than mine. :roll:
Brooke
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CSE
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Post by CSE »

Brooke, what a long and excellent review.
I suggested GPS co-ords as the description on how to get to the property is already comprehensive, even the bit you have to do on foot. As a further review-note it is good to see that Chris has forewarned clients about access.

I always think that someone who adds there website up for review is brave. One day I will be brave too.
Never try to out-stubborn your guests.
JChrisP
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Location: Casperia, Italy
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Post by JChrisP »

Thank you, folks. There's a lot to think about here.
Austria
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Post by Austria »

Lovely property and enjoyed very much reading about the history of the place, in the newspaper article link.

Ditto the comments. You may wish to consider a more memorable name for your site. If i had to find the site again would struggle to remember the site name.

Your Alexa ranking is quite low, so you may wish to consider a more memorable name i.e www.italy-rental-home if available over time would bring in more leads, and google would pick up on more searches.

Main picture is super but needs to be a bit brighter i think.

Kind regards and good luck
GoDot
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Post by GoDot »

Hi Chris.

The first thing I would do is use text on your homepage. Google cannot read text which is contained within an image, it reads html.

This is currently what Google sees on your front page - http://bit.ly/csMovU

I can't describe how bad that is in terms of SEO for ranking - basically, apart from your side bar, it sees almost nothing.

Your homepage (or any other page) doesn't contain a meta description. The following is what appears in Google for the description of your homepage:
Why Casperia? Casperia · Il Sogno · Photos · Local Amenities · Getting There · Useful Links · Rates and Details · NY Times Article (PDF) ...
The other pages on your site actually contain text, so they're not as bad.
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vrooje
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Post by vrooje »

Nice catch, GoDot -- when I looked at the site, I didn't have time to go over the code, so I didn't notice that the text was actually an image. All that text is wasted from an SEO perspective. And it's not scalable, so it's not very accessible either.

I'd agree, Chris, that should be priority number 1. Use the photo as a background image and write the text over it. Choose your font wisely and it will look almost identical to humans, but be readable by Google.
Brooke
JChrisP
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Post by JChrisP »

Thank you, thank you, thank you, GoDot. My daughter, a visual artist, did the original site a few years ago and I guess the folks who last updated it just left her original work intact. I did not realize that it had been done without readable text (not that I would have understood that at that time).
And thank you to everyone who responded (not to cut off further input). There's so much helpful input here it begins to get overwhelming.
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CSE
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Post by CSE »

Go Dot
How did you get that Google user content?
I tried to get it and in the end it went back to the google search page.
I done an on-line search and found that a lot of users were having difficulty using the User content.

Chris I am glad that you have found this forum to be of help. We look forward to you posting here a bit more too.
Never try to out-stubborn your guests.
GoDot
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Post by GoDot »

I'm not sure what you mean by 'Google user content'. Do you mean this - http://bit.ly/csMovU

Go to Google and type in your url. At the bottom of your result there should be a link that says 'cached'. Click that.

You should now be taken to the page but there should be a grey box at the top. On the bottom right of that box there should be a link that says 'text-only version'.

Click that and it strips out everything from the page, leaving only html text and image alt attributes.

Here's your front page - http://bit.ly/azeyko
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dmjarvis
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Post by dmjarvis »

I would echo most of the advice already given - especially, sorting out the home page text, breaking up the paragraphs and increasing the general font sizes on the site.

I also think that the screen footprint of the site is too small.

With such a great NYT review I would be tempted to quote a little snippet from it somewhere on the home page with a link direct to the article.

What a fantastic looking property in a lovely area!
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