Lay My Hat

We have been living permanently in France since 2004 and have a successful web design business with a wide variety of international clients.

We have our own rental properties and you can rest assured that we have spared no effort in creating and optimising our own websites to generate the best results. We are fully booked every year (15 weeks) and are offering the same website designs to you.

Link to the site in my signature - prepare to be amazed...

Take a look at the site first, and if you are interested in finding out more about what the offer includes, click here for more details.

velociphiles wrote:We are fully booked every

365 days or just the periods you aim to book?

As it says on the site, we only offer the property for 15 weeks over the summer. All but one week already sold for 2011.

However, I agree that if no-one looks at the detail on the site it could be misleading - I've updated the "more details" page to clarify this point.

I'm amazed by how long the site took to load... whereas Paolo's was displayed in seconds.

Yes that's a fair point - the loading time is governed by the "size" of the page, which in turn is driven by the images. Large, high quality images take time to load. having said that the page is pretty well optimised and has a size of 200KB - this would be less if you had fewer images in the home page slideshow.

This is always a balancing act with websites - will the visitor wait for the page to load - or go elsewhere? The increasing penetration of broadband - particularly among people that can still afford foreign holidays is pretty high and page sizes are generally increasing. The price of this pace of progress is that people on 56K dial up connections or with 800x600 monitors are getting left behind - but they are in a reducing minority and probably not considering holidays abroad.

To put things in perspective, the Telegraph home page:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
has a page size (this evening) of 895KB!

velo

Nice looking site. In my opinion (and I know you haven't asked for it) you are under pricing yourself in the peak summer weeks. Your june and September prices seem about right, but you could sell your peak summer 6 weeks for much more. To my mind you are doing yourself out of 3-4K of income.

I have to agree with Ju - I would have thought you could increase your July and August prices by at least 50 - 70%, you charge less than I do in Normandy for your summer prices. We are on the coast, with 6 bedrooms, but don't have a pool. You're a bargain, and I don't think that is what you are aiming for.

I have a broadband connection but still found the homepage slow to open. Great photos though, and I like your blog - made me think I must gird my loins and get on with my own.

velociphiles wrote:Yes that's a fair point - the loading time is governed by the "size" of the page, which in turn is driven by the images.

I just tried it again. Have you changed your front page since last night? It just loaded to a different home page compared to that last night?

Anyway, it loaded much more quickly and took about the same time as the Telewag page took to load. The views from the house are stunning. I too think you could charge more... on the other hand, your prices may be why, in January, you are already fully booked (sauf one week) for the coming season.

Loaded quickly for me.The price structure is interesting. You are cheaper than us for 12 people in high season but much more expensive the other months - perhaps one price forth whole letting season is a good idea!?

Thanks for the helpful feedback on pricing. We have played around with it over the years but settled on something that seems to work for us. Will reconsider for next year.

Haven't changed the home page - it will load much faster the second time you visit as your browser will have cached the images.

For customer sites we offer a trade off - number and quality of images in the home page slideshow v load time for the page. I am happy with the balance for our own site and think the initial impact/first impression is worth a little waiting time.

Well it was fast on first visit for me

I'm on Broadband (admittedly Devon speed broadband) and I would say the load time for your home page is unacceptable. Also page size is widely held to effect SERPS (search engine results pages) & not in a good way. Plus loads of people are browing on smart phones now using generally slow connections. Surely you should just have one nice picture on the home page & link to the slide show rather than having six pictures to download.

Front Page loading times 1.045 second(s) (0.142 s/Kb) from an online source.

velociphiles wrote:prepare to be amazed...

I wasn't amazed but surprised that I had to sit through a slow slideshow gallery of 37 images in order to see something of the house. Most of the images had nothing to do with the house, quite a few were of fruit and vegetables. I don't think a single slideshow gallery is the right way to show a house and region, it requires too much patience from the site visitor.

prepare to be amazed...


Oops, well, thank you for sharing. It took ages to load and in the real world I would have moved on but very nice property, underpriced for the peak weeks. I would not have thought that 15 weeks was especially hard to achieve for the summer period, it's the shoulders that are trickier.