Would you buy a week's holiday from this geezer ...?

[Christine Kenyon]

Well, I've had a few glasses of wine and reckon it's about time I put my head above the parapet and asked for feedback from fellow Forum members on our website for Stybarrow Cottage.

The background is as follows:

1. Our website is designed in dreamweaver and fireworks, but we only have limited technical knowledge. I wouldn't dare edit HTML for fear of losing something important (or my sanity!).

2. We have two main target markets: walkers and outdoor enthusiasts; family groups. Walkers and outdoor enthusiasts all year round; family groups mainly in the school holidays. We let our cottage on a Saturday to Saturday basis from April to October. Short breaks available from November to March.

3. We have recently "revamped" our site to take on board what we've learnt from Forum members (and boy, it's been a good learning curve ). Our site used to have a blue background with white text; we've included more photos; we've tried to tell a story - and hopefully you think we're talking to you in our text.

4. We know we need to remove the Easyspace banner (but Easyspace seem reluctant to take our money); we need a good photo of the front of the cottage; and maybe, just maybe (!) we need to include an availability calendar - based on comments from Forum members.

We would welcome your feedback on all aspects of the site and would appreciate all critical feedback. We would also love some input from the "techies" out there. How does our site rank?; is it visible to search engines?; what can we do to improve it?

Look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, the wine glass calleth ....

Cheers

Christine
http://www.stybarrowcottage.co.uk

[livinginitaly]

Ah, you thought you'd post after everyone had gone to bed eh?

Very nice site ...... similar to one of the other sites on review at the moment .... i hope there hasn't been any cheating going on

Seriously, i'm a big fan of white background and really don't know why so many people tend to go for the 'multi-image' background effect.

Firstly, may i just say that the bulk of my comments are very 'techie' ....... and really, if you are happy with all of your traffic coming from 'rental site' links then the 'faults' i mention shouldn't really concern you.

Anyway, your site .... built with dreamweaver using the 'layout' mode? i say this because it's normally quite advanced users that use overlapping 'divs' for images and text!

Unfortunately this results in stacks of extra 'code' being added by dreamweaver and (as far as search engines are concerned) pushes your real content to the bottom of the page. Search engines only normally look at the first 30 lines of code (unless it's doing a 'deep scan' but these are pretty infrequent).

Seeing as though the actual content of your page doesn't start until 146 lines some search engines will have problems 'scanning' your text.

Also, there are two broken links on the site, though i'm almost embarrassed to mention them! .....

on http://www.stybarrowcottage.co.uk/pages ... itions.htm where the 'text link' is supposed to point to pages/prices.htm, the 'full stop' actually links to 'prices.htm' which is a deadlink.

on http://www.stybarrowcottage.co.uk/pages/howtobook.htm where the 'text link' is supposed to point to pages/termsandconditions.htm, the 'full stop' actually links to 'termsandconditions.htm'

Obviously, both tiny, tiny mistakes .... but search engines will penalise sites with 'deadlinks'.

Again, your site gives a browser 'scrollbar' at 800x600 screen resolution (used by over 40% of surfers).

Finally, the quality of the main image at the top of each page doesn't represent the time and care taken across the rest of the site. Possibly because you've saved them as jpeg's. I'd recommend doing them again and saving as gifs, though in this case you may have to seperate the photo image from the text on the homepage.

Hope this helps ........ please don't hate me too much!

[livinginitaly]

oops .... couldn't leave it without commenting on the 'feel' of your site.

I 'LOVE' the way it's written! With it's casual but friendly approach you really can't help but 'get involved' .... it really was quite hard to stop and 'take a step back'.

One thing i was always taught when writing any kind of 'sales proposal' was "you matter twice as much as me". To put it another way, the use of 'You' whilst writing draws the person in, whilst the use of 'I', 'Our' or 'We' excludes the person.

'You' really have got that off to a 'fine art'

[paolo]

Christine,

I really like your writing - your friendliness comes through and engages the reader. I especially like the way you start your cottage description page:

"You might expect a former miner's cottage to be small and dark. You could be in for a surprise. Stybarrow Cottage is an airey and spacious cottage spread over three floors."

This page is usually quite boring, just listing amenities, but here the top paragraph continues to build the relationship with the reader because it is talking TO, rather than AT, the reader.

If I'm being picky, I would say the last sentence of the all-important opening paragraph on your homepage is a little loose:

"This lovely traditional Lakeland cottage is located in the village of Glenridding, on the shores of Ullswater, and is surrounded by mountains. Everywhere you look there are inspiring mountain views and glimpses of the lake. A real chance to get away from it all!"

That last sentence doesn't quite follow on from the previous ones. It needs to 'seal the deal', and that 'get away from it all' is empty of any meaning because it's a travel cliche.

Looking at the previous sentences the key phrase 'Lake District' hasn't been used so I'd stick that in there. And as walkers prefer not to drive somewhere to start a walk, that may be a point worth implying. Perhaps something like this works better:

"This lovely traditional Lakeland cottage is in the [adjective: 'cosy'/'charming'?] village of Glenridding, on the shores of Ullswater, and is surrounded by mountains. Everywhere you look there are inspiring mountain views and glimpses of the lake. The full majesty of the Lake District is right on your doorstep."

Pics
When I see an illustration rather than a photo of a house my reaction is: 'what are they trying to hide?' In this instance, because the drawing is stylised with the splashes of colour, and carried through every page almost as branding, I'm less suspicious. But I wonder if it loses you guests? Or...if the cottage is not much to look at from the outside, perhaps it gains you more guests than a photo would. We'll have to call those rhetorical questions! Anyway as a design element I think it is successful.

The pic at top left of the homepage is nice but for me it is too small. This is the only photo on the page so I would like to see a big beautiful lake district one like on your 'local area' page.

The page of local pics is beautiful. And I think I would use this pic on the homepage:



You could expend a lot of words trying to say what this picture says about your location, and not say it as well. At the moment this picture is tucked away on the 'how to find us' page, away from the main selling equation.

On your local area page I would like to see at least one photo of the village in which I would be living for a week.


I'm glad you went for the white background. I think we should make this obligatory for Lay My Hatters!

Well done on your site, you've invested it with personality, and that is the key.

[Christine Kenyon]

Thank you, guys. Brilliant feedback (as usual!) - which has resulted in a few more questions...

Livinginitaly I loved your feedback - thank you for being so "picky". I needed it! My questions to you are:

1. What can I do to reduce the code? Are you saying I need to take out some of the layers and do most of the page layout using tables .... or has my non-technie brain totally misunderstood? It's happened before!

2. Thank you for the attention to detail re the broken links. With all the talk on apostrophes in a different part of the forum, I was relieved it was only my fullstops that were playing up

3. Header image - I thought if I saved an image as a gif it made a bigger file. That's why I've opted for jpegs. Mind you, I have since read some of the fascinating stuff on Tansy's website and would be interested in trying to come up with a similar header image.

Paolo Thank you - yet again. I am giving some thought to a more punchy, Lake Districty finale to the first paragraph - that was very helpful.

I agree totally with what you say about line drawings v photographs. My problem is that it is really difficult to get a good photo of the front of our cottage, but me and my brownie haven't given up yet. As a starter I shall at least move the "location" photo to the home page. I'm also on the look out for some detailed village shots. Glenridding is a fabulous village - but it's not really ready to be described as cosy or charming!

So ... back to my glass of vino and the drawing board. Thank you both for your help.

Christine

[livinginitaly]

Hi Christine,

You say it's 'back to the drawing board', though i've got to say from where you are now, at least it's a short work ... i'd certainly put you in the 'shows great potential' group

1 - tables would reduce the code, although i've just had another look at your site and have realised that much of the 'superfluous' code is in fact to control the 'easyspace' banner .... my apologies for not noticing that before! Using tables would solve the page width problem though as you could set the table to 100% or 770 if you want to be sure to eliminate the bottom scrollbar.

2 - don't get us started on apostrophes .... apostrophe's (whatever!)

3 - ah! no, large areas of same colour space such as yours need to be saved as gif's, photo images as jpg's. That's why i mentioned that on your 'homepage' you may be best spliting the 'photo image' on the left from the large 'blue text / white background' of the header.

[vrooje]

I just took a quick look and the front page is not displayed correctly for me. The drawing of the house with its caption overlaps the main text area, so the words are cutoff of the main text area on the right. This actually happens to some extent on every page, where the pictures and text meet.

This is almost certainly because I use Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer as my browser, and also because I have a minimum font size set in my preferences -- my screen resolution is very high (for other reasons) so I have to force large fonts in some cases so that I can read the default text on webpages.

Obviously you don't have to change your site so that one person with tweaked preferences can view it, but in general it's important to test your site with as many browsers as possible to make sure that it displays well in all of them.

Beautiful! The white background gives it a very clean feel -- so many rental sites are too busy. It's so good that your address is at the bottom of every page.

[Christine Kenyon]

Thank you again, Nightowl Tony. I shall hopefully get chance to have a go at the gif and jpegs today.

With regard to the Easyspace code I am having trouble getting them to take my money and remove their banner. Could I just edit the code?

Hello Vrooje and thank you for your feedback. I think the problem with picture/text overlap should be solved if I use tables for the page layout. At the moment the picture is a layer (which I think means it moves about depending on what the screen size).

Cheers
Christine

[livinginitaly]

With regard to the Easyspace code I am having trouble getting them to take my money and remove their banner. Could I just edit the code?

Sadly no, the code is normally added by the easyspace server to each page when it gets displayed ..... it's not actually on the page you build, so you have no control over it.

Then again here's the code, take a look at your page in 'code view' and let me know if you can see any of this. If you can, we should be able to do something about it.

<SCRIPT>
<!--
var dWM3=0;
var dWM4=62;
var dWM5=470;
var dWM6=12;
var dWM7=200;
var dWM8=0;
var dWM9=0;
var dWM0,dWM10;
var dWM11,dWM12,dWM13,dWM8,dWM14;
var dWM15,dWM16,dWM17=500;
function dWM1()
{
if(dWM8==1)
return true;
if(document.all)
{
dWM11=document.all("dWM18").style;
dWM12=document.all("dWM19").style;
dWM20=dWM4+dWM3+0;
dWM21=dWM5+dWM6+dWM3;
dWM22='visible';
dWM23='hidden';
}
else
{
dWM22='show';
dWM23='hide';
dWM11=document.dWM18;
dWM12=document.dWM19;
dWM20=dWM4+dWM3+15;
dWM21=dWM5+dWM6+dWM3+15;
}
if(dWM0=="00001166")
{
if(document.all)
{
dWM12.display='none';
dWM11.display='none';
}
return true;
}
if(document.all)
{
if(document.body.clientHeight<dWM7||document.body.clientWidth<dWM7)
return true;
}
else if(document.layers)
{
if(window.innerHeight<dWM7||window.innerWidth<dWM7)
return true;
}
dWM8=1;
dWM2();
dWM11.visibility=dWM22;
dWM14=setTimeout("dWM24()",30000);
if(document.layers)
dWM25();
}
function dWM25()
{
if(pageXOffset!=dWM15||pageYOffset!=dWM16)
{
dWM15=pageXOffset;
dWM16=pageYOffset;
dWM2();
if(dWM17>=500)
{
dWM17=20;
setTimeout("checkTime=500",1000);
}
}
dWM10=setTimeout("dWM25()",dWM17);
}
function dWM2()
{
if(!dWM8)
return true;
if(document.all)
{
if(document.body.scrollHeight<document.body.clientHeight
||document.body.scrollTop<((document.body.scrollHeight-document.body.clientHeight)/2))
{
dWM11.top=document.body.scrollTop+document.body.clientHeight-dWM20;
dWM12.top=document.body.scrollTop+document.body.clientHeight-dWM20;
}
else
{
dWM11.top=document.body.scrollTop+dWM3;
dWM12.top=document.body.scrollTop+dWM3;
}
dWM11.left=document.body.scrollLeft+document.body.clientWidth-dWM21;
dWM12.left=document.body.scrollLeft+document.body.clientWidth-dWM21+dWM5;
}
else if(document.layers)
{
if(window.pageYOffset<((window.outerHeight-window.innerHeight)/2))
{
dWM11.top=window.pageYOffset+window.innerHeight-dWM20;
dWM12.top=window.pageYOffset+window.innerHeight-dWM20;
}
else
{
dWM11.top=window.pageYOffset+dWM3;
dWM12.top=window.pageYOffset+dWM3;
}
dWM11.left=window.pageXOffset+window.innerWidth-dWM21;
dWM12.left=window.pageXOffset+window.innerWidth-dWM21+dWM5;
}
}
function dWM24()
{
dWM9=1;
dWM12.visibility=dWM22;
dWM11.visibility=dWM23;
clearTimeout(dWM14);
}
function dWM26()
{
dWM9=0;
dWM12.visibility=dWM23;
dWM11.visibility=dWM22;
}
//-->
</SCRIPT>

[Christine Kenyon]

Hello again, folks. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I've been busy writing Christmas cards, wrapping stuff and generally getting organised .... I've also had a play with my website:

Vrooje: I've replaced most of the layers and used a table format for the design so hopefully this has overcome the problem with the overlapping of words and pics. Would be grateful if you could confirm this is the case.

Tony: Two weeks later and I've had an email from Easyspace to say they've forwarded my enquiry to their sales team who tell me there is no Easyspace banner on my site. All I need now is a wall to bang my head against! But I keep trying. I've also had a look at the code and there is no code along the lines you've described so I don't think it can be "ex-communicated".

Paolo: Wording changed and location picture put on the home page. Still waiting for some proper sunshine to get a proper picture of the cottage, but me and my brownie are ready......

Another thought re the website reviews - which are proving very helpful and useful reading. It is also very obvious that Paolo, Tony and a few others are taking the time to review most, if not all, sites. Maybe a condition of having your own site reviewed, is that you provide feedback on at least two (or whatever number you think is appropriate) other sites. Obviously it doesn't have to be technical feedback, but maybe feedback on how you think potential customers would react. Just a thought

[paolo]

Hi Christine,

Originally I was going to limit website reviews to people who had make 10 posts on the forum, but I thought that would be too restrictive, as not everyone has 10 opinions/questions to post.

I'll add something to the suggestions for website reviews along the lines of what you say - 'please take the time to review a couple of other sites if yours is reviewed'.

[vrooje]

Christine,

I'm so sorry this took me so long to get back to.

Yes, the overlapping issue on your front page is completely resolved! I still get some overlap on the other pages, but it's not that serious. You're a dear to go through all that for us anti-IE people!

Cheers,
-Vrooje

[enid]

Hi Christine

As I am in the process of reviewing my web page I am reading through the feedback in this forum agaon to focus my thinking! I feel deservedly admonished by your comments about returning feedback so here goes for your site!

I like the white background ( well I would as mine is the same!!) as it does make everything easy to read. I did find the blue heading a bit startling - but then it is early in the morning!

Your site was a great example of Paolo's 'tell a story' and 'Talk to the target audience' advice - I really felt that you were involving me directly. I liked the guest comments - usually I find these rather trite but you made it work on your page and I shall definitely rethink including comments from clients now. I liked the simplicity of your text - factual and accessible without being too wordy - I'll try to get that balance in mine.

Sorry but the banner popping up all the time was a problem and I would try to get an exterior photo.

Well done Christine! Did you have the odd glass or two whilst designing the site - if so that's a tip I could copy too!

[Christine Kenyon]

Hello Enid. I didn't mean to admonish anyone . I just thought that Paolo, Tony and others seemed to be doing all the work - and no doubt were enjoying it - and maybe we should all share in it a bit.

Anyway, thank you for your feedback - much appreciated. You've highlighted the two areas I'm working on:

1. Removing the Easyspace banner - this project started on 8 December and could become my life's work! After various emails, I've now been given a phone number. I'm not holding my breath and may just resort to transferring to another provider.

2. Improving the headline section to make it more interesting. I'm trying to learn how to do curved edges and a few other things and will be having a good look at the "build your own website" bit on the forum to pick up any tips.

I've found the forum a fascinating experience and continue to overwhelmed by the fount of knowledge that's been unleashed. But - and it's a big but - whilst I think we should all share our knowledge, I'm afraid I can't possibly divulge how many glasses of wine were consumed in the designing of our website . But it was red wine and there were more than two!

Keep on enjoying the good life in France!

Cheers

Christine

[Christine Kenyon]

Hello again. I think I'm at the stage where I've incorporated all of the feedback where possible. I'm still waiting for some stunning blue skies and good ol' Lake District sunshine to get a good picture of the cottage itself and some better internal shots, but they will come. I am also still debating whether or not to include an availability calendar ... am watching the debate with interest and am trying to keep a record of how many enquiries I convert to dates they didn't want (if you see what I mean!).

Anyway, before I reach for the wine glass, I just wanted to say a big "thank you" to Paolo, Nightowl Tony, Vrooje and Enid for your feedback. A bit thank you also to Tony for all his help with the banner for our website. If I'm honest it's all Tony's work. Help beyond the call of duty, but much, much appreciated.

Thank you everyone.

Christine