I would very much appreicate your views on my site..thanks!

[sazzleevans]

I have set up a site prior to my apartment being built so there are no actual photos of the property but they will be added in May 2005 following completition.

I would very much appreciate your comments on my site.

Thank you for your help.

SARAH

WWW.ISLACANELAHOLIDAYS.COM

[vrooje]

Sarah,

Welcome to the forums!

First, I like your site overall -- the fact that you have lots of pictures on your intro page is a very good thing. You've certainly done a lot of work considering your apartment isn't finished yet!

Here's what your page looks like on my screen:


Note that I use Mozilla Firefox in Linux, so if it doesn't look the way you expected, that might be why. That bottom part isn't part of your site -- that's my status bar, similar to the bar in Windows.

Let me use a list format (in no particular order) to give you my suggestions:

• Your page text needs to be bigger. I don't know if you can tell from the screenshot, but the text is teeny. That plus the additional fact that it's white on red makes it very, very hard to read. Many of your clients will probably be older, so it's to your advantage to make the fonts quite a bit bigger.
  
  You need some pictures of the property (you know this, I know, but I'm sayin' it anyway) on the front page as well as on the "Apartment" page.
  
  I'm aware from the home page that the web page is for an apartment, and it's somewhat clear that it's for rent, but not totally. Why not add a single sentence at the top of your page (near the "Golf Here" link) that explicitly states that you have a two-bedroom, two-bathroom holiday rental apartment in Isla Canela, Spain? And you might also give a general price range on the homepage too. As a web user I like to have all that information up front -- if I have to go searching for it I'm as likely to go somewhere else as not.
  
  Your images are just the right pixel size for their placement on the page -- that's great. There are a couple, though, that could probably be optimized a little more. On your home page, for example, the large graphic is 44K, which is okay on its own, but with all the other images on the page it could be a bit much. I'd try to get it to between 35-40K. If you could shave that much off all your images, think how much faster your pages would load for dial-up users! The sunset picture could probably be brought down to 20-24K, and the apartment picture could be made into a 20K image, most likely.
  
  Why the golf animated cartoon on the home page? I don't think it fits with the rest of your site.
  
  I'd rename the "Location" link to something more descriptive -- that's a bit general.
  
  You have a lot of links to other web sites. That's fine -- can you get any of them to link back to you? That will help your search engine placement. Either way, your links off-site should open in a new window -- never make it easy for the client to surf away from your site! (Don't make it hard, but just don't offer up lots of chances.)
  
  I suggest that the "requested dates" on your booking form be given a box of their own, and made a required field. If you just ask people to put it in their comments as part of the form, I'd be willing to bet that some will forget, and then you'll just get the odd "hi, we have four adults, is your property available?" inquiry without any dates.
  
  I also suggest putting at least your e-mail at the bottom of every page, so that you're fully accessible to the potential client on all pages. I'd also suggest using some means of protecting your e-mail from spiders and robots that crawl the web searching for e-mail addresses to add to spam lists. You can do that using a simple piece of javascript; that's been posted elsewhere on the forum, probably in several places.

Overall, I think you're off to a very good start! I'm sure others will have other suggestions, as well -- I didn't delve into your code very deeply or anything.

Cheers!

[sazzleevans]

Hi Brooke

Thanks very much for looking at my site. I really do appreciate your feedback.

I like the colour of the site but my partner did mention before that he thought it might be hard to read?

I am going to write a list of things to change and get them all done at the same time when I have photos of the "real" apartment as I have a colleague who is hosting and maintaining the site and dont want to be too much of a pain:)

So your advise is very much appreciate. He will have a big list of things TO DO and your tips will be included.

If anyone else wants to comment. I would appreciate it.

Thank you.

Sarah

PS This site is a god send

[vrooje]

Sarah,

on the page color... I don't mind it, myself, but I do think it would be easier to read if it were all like the white bar you have on the homepage -- dark red on white. You could flip all your colors so that your page is a white table on a dark red background, and the fonts are black and dark red. I think that might just be easier for some to read.

Like I said, though, I personally like the idea of a dark red background... as long as the text is a little bigger!

Cheers,

[sazzleevans]

Thanks Brookie. I appreciate your advise.

I just wanted to pose another questions if I could. Both my partner and now Paolo think that I should show potential customers photos of the building which is still under construction.

Paolo has come up with quite a good idea of counting down to completion. Any view about this?

Or any other view about the site?

Sarah

[paolo]

I just wanted to pose another questions if I could. Both my partner and now Paolo think that I should show potential customers photos of the building which is still under construction

Yes, but...

I wouldn't just show just a pic of a construction site on your website. In our email correspondence on this I picked up on the fact that you'd had some interest already, and you were thinking of sending out a newsletter. So I think in that newsletter or in separate emails you could keep people updated on progress on the building. Coupled with a banner saying "Only 65 days to go!"

On your website you could have a series of pics (if you have them) showing the progress being made. This is better than just showing one pic of a building site. One pic on its own will plant negative thoughts of those nightmare my-hotel-was-a-building-site holidays we hear about (usually in Spain!), whereas a sequence showing clear progress will demonstrate that this thing really will be ready by summer.

[paolo]

I can't access your site at the moment, but from memory I agree with every word of Brooke's - do as she says and you won't go far wrong. I'll try again another time.