Visit England Tourism Website of the Year 2005

[Normandy Cow]

In Saturday's Times Travel supplement, there was a 4-page supplement of the "100 Best Travel Websites", and it included the following:

www.lythhillhouse.com
Lyth Hill House B&B won Visit England's Tourism website of the year award in 2005. Despite being a small business, it has made an effort to provide extra information and pictures of rooms, the grounds and facilities. You can see multiple views of each room, and there is even a floor-plan PDF option.

It would be interesting to see what we on LayMyHat would have made of it if they had put it forward for one of our web reviews. My initial reaction was that it was too busy and I wasn't keen on the font and colour-scheme, but that is just my personal preference, and I can see that it has loads of content and info, which can only be a good thing (and they appear to be very successful, judging by the number of positive comments)! Good Luck Heather and Dave!

[paolo]

Informationally (if that is a word), I find it very good. The 'Visual access' options are something I haven't seen before and very thoughtful. Design-wise, it's not award-winning, but it probably doesn't scare off their target market. Overall the site says to me "We care!" which is very reassuring.

[Martha]

Interesting! As you say, not slick but very thorough, and I really like the visual access idea.

Here's the whole article online - will have to read this when I have more time - looks like it's very useful...
http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/article ... 82,00.html

I also looked up the Guardian's awards:
http://travel.guardian.co.uk/awards2005 ... 80,00.html

where I found this one, which I liked....
http://www.inntravel.co.uk/

[Ju]

I agree about the colour scheme, but I have to admit it has all the information you could want laid out in an easy to understand manner. I guess that's what you want from a web site.

Ju

[mvus]

Wouldn't a spokenword/audio commentary with perhaps a slide show be a better alternative for the visually impaired?

You could put a small audio file on each page that reads the text

Just a thought

[HLT]

I got a shock when I spotted - and bravely followed - the link to the laymyhat site among our visitor stats. To think that you had troubled to quote the bit from the Times, about our website - "thank you Catherine" and also not to find anything too damning from you all was a big relief.
The best thing is to see that the plus points you have spotted are the quality of information, the visitor comments and that we care. Our website seems to be doing its job and I'm only sorry that not all of you like the colour scheme. Anyway, I have now registered simply to reply to you and wish you all well, thank you. Heather

[Normandy Cow]

WOW!!! Welcome to LayMyHat, Heather!

It's funny, I was going to suggest that we invite you to join LMH as I thought that you would probably be a useful member - but I didn't realise that you were already aware of us!!! Thank goodness I wasn't rude about your website!!! (not that I would have been )

Never mind about the colour scheme - one thing that I have learnt over the past year is that you are NEVER going to find a colour scheme or typeface that will please everyone! Just because it's not my favourite would not stop me from booking at your place if I was looking for a B&B in your neck of the woods - it's all the rest of the info that counts, and you certainly score highly in that respect.

Keep up the good work...

[paolo]

Welcome, Heather, and congratulations on your award.

How does the site perform for you in terms of bookings? Is it your best source of reservations? I imagine you also get a high percentage of return guests.

Great to have an award-winning owner in our midst!

[HLT]

As you know, it's very difficult to quantify the effect of a website - people may find us via an advert but then will go to the website before booking. Taking that type of booking into account as well as those who come directly from the web, I think the percentage of NEW bookings via the web is probably something like 85%. But yes, we get a high percentage of repeats, something like 65% last year. The frustrating thing is that for bookings from April to October, we have to turn so many away.

Thank you for your encouragement on the Lay my Hat site - when we get chance - probably next winter!! - we'll have a look at colours/fonts etc and the various points raised about our site so far.

One suggestion which might work for your members - to have an optional page listing members who offer a "half-price" deal where each one is willing to offer accommodation to other members at half-price subject to availability and only at very short notice. That way, it helps all of us... We used to have that system with the Tourist Boards here and it worked really well for members. (It is no longer available because some of the Boards don't have membership as such).

I should be busy so back to work, thank you again.

[HLT]

Following your interest in www.lythhillhouse.com in 2006, I thought you might like to have a look at the site again. We recently did a complete re-vamp of the site, and tried to address most of the issues you guys mentioned - especially the colours - and hope that we haven't lost the things that were good whilst doing the changes! Let us know what you think, and have a very happy New Year!

[Hells Bells]

Browsing through the old threads tonight, and I came across this one. Apparently the b&b is now up for sale. A good business opportunity for someone?