AT LAST my website! please have a look

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.
catherinedonegal
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Location: Dunkineely, County Donegal, Ireland
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AT LAST my website! please have a look

Post by catherinedonegal »

at last and after my first year of letting i have started making my own site for daisy cottage as opposed to just my blogs.

the site is very much in it's infancy but i think i have the bones of it on on which to build. i found this site (weebly) to build it and found it so easy even for me. of course i have mountains more info and pics to add later.

if any of you have the time, i would appreciate if you would take the time to have a look-see bearing in mind it is far from finished. maybe it should be finished before asking for a review? but i would rather get it right from the start with more experienced folks input.

i do have the domain for daisycottagedonegal.com already purchased but am using the weebly link for the time being until i make the daisy cottage site 'live'.

hope some of you have the time to look and give me a critique and ideas.

thanks,

catherine

http://catherinemac.weebly.com/index.html
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Windy
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Location: Windermere UK

Post by Windy »

Hi Catherine

Well you have loads of content which is a great start!

I think the home page needs a whopping great photo and some bullet points to hit visitors between the eyes with, and overall there is lots of text and too few images, so I think you might want to look at the balance there.

Why do I like the stitchy weavy thing in the logo? - is there something about Ireland and needlework in my sub-conscious? The light green colour is lovely though. (personal thing that but it works for me)

The header image has a very large space over it which pushes the rest down - it's a bit of a waste so you may want to move it all up a bit.

Nothing to do with the design but the pricing structure looks a bit like a blunt instrument if you'll forgive me for saying so. You know your own market but we have about 10 different prices between January and June compared to your one!

Your terms & conditions lookk very simple though :lol: (Yeah OK I know you'll be posting them soon)

Can you embed the blog into the site rather than having links?
That would be better if you could manage it I think.
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Mountain Goat
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Post by Mountain Goat »

Pretty good....but get someone to proofread carefully: spelling (trek not treck), punctuation (too many grocers' apostrophes - it's should be its when possessive), capitalise proper nouns (Freeview Sky) - that sort of thing.

Good luck.

MG
catherinedonegal
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Location: Dunkineely, County Donegal, Ireland
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Post by catherinedonegal »

thank you both for your input.

windy. t&c chuckled at that. gotta give my in house lawyer a hard kick up up the ass what?

mg: your post made me laugh so much. here am i the queen of pedants and i f%ck up my own input. DOH!

will work on it and hope you will all feel free to add more here, for which i thank you in advance.
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Mountain Goat
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Post by Mountain Goat »

OK, can't help it or I won't sleep:

Home Page
Para 1 year-old instead of year old
Para2 Get-together
Para3 the the / mattresses
Para 4 choose tv or TV preferably latter
books, factual, biographical and fiction = perhaps books (factual…..fiction)
Don’t start sentence with And?
Para 6 choose instead of chose

That sort of thing?

MG
catherinedonegal
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Post by catherinedonegal »

thanks mg. corrected all the typos. funny how one can think they are so bloody smart at english and then make a total cock of it when actually doing it. appreciate your time. thanks. oh, and please continue with the pedant stuff. i need it.
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Mountain Goat
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Post by Mountain Goat »

I can never check my own stuff - impossible.

Just don't look at mine, though..... :lol:

MG
catherinedonegal
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Location: Dunkineely, County Donegal, Ireland
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Post by catherinedonegal »

it is hard to see our own typos probably.

but i like someone having the balls just to point them out to me. no point in saying all good when there are terrible faults. so i DO appreciate your input.

hit me! :D
Margaret
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Post by Margaret »

Looking at the prices page - why do you think it is a blunt instrument Windy? - 'contact' not 'contacat'.
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Windy
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Post by Windy »

Looking at the prices page - why do you think it is a blunt instrument Windy?
Well Catherine only has two price points for the entire year. Having looked at your site again Margaret I see you only have 3 price points so I see why you ask. Mind you, you do have 9 units all with different prices so in your case it's probably self preservation. :lol:

We vary our prices depending on time of year and bank / school holidays - I have over ten different rates, and all of the owners on the site I run for local owners do something similiar (by choice, and not because I suggest it to them by the way)

It may be that we are over-egging the pudding but I think not.
It seems reasonable to me that where I have my properties (in the Lake District) you can ask more in September than in November, but that late October half-term week can still be sold at a premium. It's a supply and demand thing. I was lucky when I started that I had plenty of examples of pricing curves on locally based web sites to learn from, but I now also tweak them based on experience (and what other people are doing locally).

One advantage we have as private owners with websites (as opposed to big agencies with brochures) is that our pricing can be infinitely flexible. I set my prices reasonably early (we published this year in about August last year ) and monitor percentage of availabilty sold on an ongoing basis. If I am ahead or behind I can tweak prices accordingly at a moment's notice.

Having said all that I am open to the argument that guests may find simplicity easier to handle, but in most cases we are trying to maximise income, so what counts is obviously the maximum value of bookings you can get.

If flexing the curve a little improves the return then it's got to be worth it. The key question of course is where to flex it and how much, which is a debate in itself isn't it?
the availabilty locally of freshly caught fish
It's maddening checking your OWN typing isn't it :? (Maybe cut and paste the text into Word so the typos show up better?)
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

I've recently got a laptop and I'm now even less of a fan of sites with main navigation on the left. A real pfaff when browsing sites using the trackpad, or at least it is for laptop novices like me.

And, if you're going to use Jquery gallery techniques like 'lightbox' for your photo gallery, try to ensure the pop up photos appear above the fold as the portrait size of the hallway means I have to scroll down to access the gallery nav controls. This is annoying enough using a mouse; even more so using a laptop.

Apologies to MG for starting a sentence with 'And'.
Margaret
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Post by Margaret »

Windy - we had more rates when we started - 4 as far as I remember. Charging less in the low season wasn't achieving anything as far as we could see - apart from bringing us less money at times of the year which were mostly higher cost because of the heating. So we cut out the lowest rate. Now we have a base rate for most of the year and higher rates only for those weeks when we know we will always be fully booked (2 weeks in Feb, 4 weeks in summer) and the highest rate for the 2 weeks when we know we will always be fully booked months in advance (Xmas and New Year). I think you have vastly higher occupancy than we do, so your multiple rates are obviously right for you. When we next feel confident enough to raise rates I might try restricting the present lowest rate to low season and introducing a mid season rate. We don't have reliable UK half term or even Easter occupancy here.
KathyG
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Post by KathyG »

I thoroughly enjoyed reading about your renovations when you were detailing them on LMH so it's great to see Daisy Cottage finally finished with paying guests!

Website's looking good, agree with Windy, just need loads and loads of photos, as big as you can go. Other than that everything else seems to be there.
Couple of typos:
Home page 2nd para - availabilty (i missing)
3rd para - matresses, (should be double t) and also needs changing on your bedding page too.
whb? - Sure I'm being stupid here but don't know what this is!
Kathy
Waterfront location in Le Faou
"My goal in life is to become as wonderful as my dog thinks I am."
declanja
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Post by declanja »

Had a quick look at your new site and well done. Just a few impressions. I thought the site looks good and fresh. Is there a reason why you have no photo of the exterior of the house? I think it would help. I also think you should have more photos on each page. While the daisies look lovely, good appealing photos of the property might be better. Your contact and calander pages are blank.
Best of luck.

Declan
Austria
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Post by Austria »

The contact page is still blank, it assures people if they have as many contact details as possible including an address.

A section about you and how why you have the property is also helpful in building up confidence with prospective punters.

Also put in a link page of resources ( web pages that link back to you, Google likes this and your ranking will rise), best of luck with the business.

Kind regards

Derek
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