First attempt at website

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.
axwhale
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu May 29, 2008 7:22 am

First attempt at website

Post by axwhale »

Hi , Ive just found this site its wonderful , so much good information and help.

I have just finished my first attempt at a website for my apartment which I am renting. I have used a well known web company to advertise last year but thought my own site would be an extra. I would appreciate all comments on the site and any ideas to improve etc. Also if anyone can tell me how to get hits on the website via a search engine etc. Im not that clever on computers and it took me a while to work out how to do it I tried to make it easy to work your way round it hopefully thinking that many like me are not smart on the old computer.

I have put the website address which is www.palomaressunbreaks.co.uk I hope I am allowed to do so

:) axwhale
la vache!
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Post by la vache! »

Hi Axwhale,
Welcome to LMH! Just at first glance, I'd say that there is too much text and not enough photos on the site, particularly on the homepage. I couldn't see any photos of the inside of the apartment or the pretty outside dining area that you described beautifully. The pool photo doesn't really do it justice either. I'm not a great fan of the green background and blue text either, although the content of the site was great. It just needs to be broken up a bit by photos and have less of it on the homepage, just the basics, how many people it sleeps, where it is, main facilities etc.
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Titti
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Location: Assisi, Umbria, Italy
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Post by Titti »

Hello axwale

you have some very nice and bright pictures of the locations in there but the pictures of the room look deformed by the fish eye lens.

I know by personal experience that is very difficult to take pictures of relatively small rooms. But the use of fish eye in so many pictures makes one think that all rooms are small, while this is most likely not the case. Could you may be change one or two? Or cut off the "arched" sides?

I also find the blue background difficult to read. I would go for white or a much lighter blue.
goosie
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Joined: Mon Mar 10, 2008 1:47 pm
Location: Cotswolds

Post by goosie »

Hello Axwale and welcome.

You've obviously put in a lot of effort on your website and the general lay out and navigation is good. I agree with LV that there is too much writing. Our website is getting a fair number of hits but people tend to look at the whole website for an average of about 2 minutes. That's a lot of information you need to get over in that time and photos are the key.

Personally, I would have something on the first page - a short paragraph saying what the property is, what facilities there are and the location. I would then have the photos bar as near the second one so people can glance at it. The indoor photos look fine to me but the outdoor ones, especially of the pool, are not as enticing.

And I would definitely ditch blue on blue (that's waht it comes up with on my pc anyway!) and calm it down a bit.

good luck!
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vrooje
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Location: Burgundy, France

Post by vrooje »

Welcome to LMH! Here are my comments/suggestions:
  • I suggest that you get rid of the landing page, the one that just says "Welcome to our website." It's completely unnecessary and you could lose potential customers, some of whom won't look past the first page and the lack of information it provides. Make your "1 First.htm" page the home page, and move the "Apartment - Balcones del Marques - Palomares - Spain" title from the current home page to the new home page.

    While I'm on the topic, I'd advise against putting spaces in your file names. It won't be a problem most of the time, but some browsers/users will have a problem with it.

    I agree completely with others that you need a higher contrast between the text and the background. You essentially have blue on blue -- no wonder it's hard to read! Try a simple white background and see if you like the look of that. I'd bet it will look a lot better.

    Also agree that you need more photos, especially on your apartment page. You do have interior photos of the apartment, just not on the apartment page! If you're going to keep it like that, you should at least state on the apartment page that you have a photos page showing pictures of the apartment (and link to it within the text). But I think you'd do better to at least show a couple of interior photos on the apartment page. Otherwise it just looks like you could be hiding something.

    In terms of search engines, the most important tip I can give you is to spruce up your page titles. When Google reads your page title as "Home" it doesn't really know what your page is about. If your page title was instead "Luxury Rental Apartment in Palomares, Costa Almeria, Spain" then Google would have more information about your site. Include keywords in all your page titles.

    Also for search engines, you should add alternate text and titles to all your images.
I think you have a lot of information here and it looks like a nice apartment -- just a few tweaks and your website will be even better!
Brooke
Shakir
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Joined: Wed May 07, 2008 7:24 pm
Location: Barcelona

Post by Shakir »

Hi.
I disagree about the 'too much writing'.
And the fisheye lens doesn't appear to be misleadingly distorting your photos at all...
It is good for seo to have a content rich in keywords and a larger word count is also beneficial.
People can chose if they want to read every word or just skim the key facts (which maybe could be summarized in the 1st paragraph's on each page).

On a functionality level, I think its good. Its all there and accessible but on a design level I think you could get rid of the MASSIVE heading font on each page!
And the navigation buttons also are huge.

The availability calendar site you use perhaps you could put in an iframe so as to stay on your sites domain.

Possibly you have designed this on the luxury of having a large monitor at a high resolution but Im on a laptop at 1024x768 (which is now pretty much the standard for benchmarking) *Used to be as low as 800x600 but thankfully this has now at least moved up a notch lol.

I have found this site http://www.browsershots.org/
to be an invaluable resource for testing how a page looks on multiple browsers! (I do a lot of cross browser troubleshooting due to CMS/SQL/HTML/CSS & PHP sometimes fighting eachother :)

To give it some structure, you could also experiment with a uniformed page size with perhaps some type of border around it instead of the page 'bleeding' off into anywhereland..

Looks like a cool apartment :)

Shakir
torontocomfort
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Joined: Wed May 21, 2008 10:04 pm
Location: Toronto

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Post by torontocomfort »

Your place looks really neat and beautiful... lots of sunny :) In my opinion, you should include some photos along with text in your "Apartment" page, e.g. talk about the kitchen blow the photo of the kitchen. I just feel its pain with too much text together, without photos.

I am starting out myself and have some same problem as well... plan to fix it soon myself! Just my opinion..! Otherwise, it looks nice place!
axwhale
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu May 29, 2008 7:22 am

New website

Post by axwhale »

Thank you all so much for your replies and helpfull advice and tips. I am fiddling around with the website www.palomaressunbreaks.co.uk and trying to take everything on board. Have changed a few things with a bit more to do yet. All very much appreciated. :)

Axwhale
KathyG
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Location: Le Faou, Brittany
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Post by KathyG »

Shakir wrote:I have found this site http://www.browsershots.org/
to be an invaluable resource for testing how a page looks on multiple browsers!
Thank you Shakir, that site's absolutely fascinating!! :D
Kathy
Waterfront location in Le Faou
"My goal in life is to become as wonderful as my dog thinks I am."
axwhale
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Joined: Thu May 29, 2008 7:22 am

Post by axwhale »

Have added a few more photos and changed the colour to white of the background as suggested , think the white is easier on the eye.
Hope the other changes are for the better, have tried to make it as easy to use as possible . Sure there are lots like me that aren't very good with computers.

Cheers again everyone for all your comments :)

Axwhale
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DrRichard
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Post by DrRichard »

Hi Axwhale

You have a good looking site and you've obviously put a lot of work into it. You asked for some ideas to improve it and also how to get seen by the search engines, so here goes :

You have a nice amount of content on the site. It's always good to create plenty of pages and to fill them full of interesting copy. Search engines will like this and visitors will find interesting stuff to read. You should try to continue to build content and add more pages to the site. Get excited about your subject and really go to town on the stuff that you are interested in! It might be better to break the pages up a little bit so that visitors don't see huge amounts of similar text.

Your pictures are a good start but you need to make these are as stunning as possible. It's also nice if you can click on them and see a larger version.

You could use better titles for the pages. Include your keywords and describe what's on the page! Also use these keywords in the content. This will all help with the search engines

Speaking of search engines, you asked how to get yourself seen. This really comes down to starting to collect links to your site. There are lots of ways to do this but blogs, forums, and social networks are good places to start.

The width of the site may be a little big. Also when you shrink the browser the images drop down to the next line. You might want to make it a fixed width layout to avoid this.

It would be good to add some borders or some graphics around the side to create a frame. I felt a bit lost in all that white space!

Hope this helps and if you need any more just let me know...
Dr. Richard
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CSE
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Post by CSE »

Thank you Shakir for sharing the link to the browser site.
Never try to out-stubborn your guests.
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DrRichard
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Post by DrRichard »

Hi Axwhale

Looking back over the discussion I noticed one more thing but it looks like you fixed it already. It seems you used to have a welcome page - welcome to my site - something like that. It is best to avoid these since

(a) visitors can get put off trying to get through this page

(b) your home page needs to have lots of interesting content on it. This is probably the page that you work on the most and will hopefully get the most links. So you need to make sure it has plenty of relevant copy for search engines

Have fun!
Dr. Richard
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Fil
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Post by Fil »

Maybe you could "narrow" the content of the pages and put them within a frame leaving margins on the side. This would make them lighter.
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DrRichard
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Post by DrRichard »

Good idea - this would solve the "liquid layout" problem. It's pretty hard to get an expandable-width site to work when you have lots of pictures (as we all do on vacation rental sites!)

Dr. Richard
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