cortezcottage.com

[Guthrie]

Would appreciate any thoughts on how to improve our site. After 2 3 years of having a fulltime tenant we are going back to vacation/holiday rentals and would like to update it so any thoughts at all would be helpful! Thanks in advance.

[Wendy@NorthIdaho]

Beautiful website, looks lovely, I have no suggestions for improvement.

One question, it seems early to me to be advertising for 2012, do you have people already reserving for next year?

Wendy

[Guthrie]

Wendy,

Thanks for the feedback.

We have had a full time tenant for the past 3 years and they were wonderful. They are there until January 5, 2012 but we are considering advertising in the next month or two to encourage some new traffic.

I have kept advertising the property on some free sites even though was rented so I could continue to generate an email base of potential new clients. I created a nice response letter simply saying we were fully booked until then but we would keep their details should anything change and we would be notifying them of special offers, etc.

Anita

[Beachcondo]

Double posted.

[Beachcondo]

One question, it seems early to me to be advertising for 2012, do you have people already reserving for next year?

Wendy

On the contrary, I've already had over 10 requests for February-March next year - even though I'm already booked!

The only problem you might have is that many of the snowbirds are on location now and want to view, which could prove difficult with a tenant residing full time.

Welcome to the forum Anita!
Sorry, I haven't checked out your website. I'll get to that later.

Marie-Louise

[Beachcondo]

There are many people on the forum who are much more tech savvy than I am and they can tell you if you are optimized for SEO etc.

A totally amateurish view:

First of all I think your website is very inviting and gives lots of good information. It makes ME want to stay there! (and I have my own place across the bridge)

a few small buts:
The top of your gallery is almost into the text above.

The availability chart is not opening up in a new window which might lead people to wander via homeaway connect and then to homeaway (with lots of competition) and then if they close it down, your website will be lost.

The click here link opens up an Outlook Express page. I don't use Outlook Express and probably many with me, which might make it more complicated to contact you. And we don't want that now, do we?

That's all I can think of - good luck with the rentals next year!

[Guthrie]

Thanks for the ideas and whats an optimized SEO? Yikes!
The other things I will address as well!

[Wendy@NorthIdaho]

Wow, beachcondo, congrats on having people want to book next year! I'm still working on this one!

Good idea continuing your advertising instead of starting back from scratch.

Wendy

[CSE]

The first thing I have noticed is that the web address is not very good for SEO. I see it is hosted by apple somehow. Is there are reason for this?

I can see some errors like on this page
http://web.mac.com/cortez_fl/Site/GALLERY.html#5
I cannot hit the “back to album “ or download” very easily.
There seems to be no alt text to photos.
There does not seem to be a site map or robots text files.
The following errors are found with the html. These results are for the first page, so you should check all the other pages too.
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/vali ... LCOME.html
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1 ... LCOME.html

There could be more SEO work for you, but at present I do not have enough time to glance over all of it.
The layout is nice and simple.

Some notes about some of the text.....

I can see that your property sleeps 1 to 6 persons. However anything above 4 people you ask extra supplement. This could be a barrier to some customers.
If you are aiming to have U.K. visitors to then some of the equipment terminology may have to changed.

[Guthrie]

Ian,

WOW! Thanks for the feedback. I will try to understand it and look into the correcting problems you have found.

The site is hosted by apple because it is through our mac.com account which also provided the template.

The extra supplement of 15.00 per day is for the shack which sleeps two. Also we wanted to discourage spring break teenagers from renting and filling the place with 20 party animals! Thants why we stated 15.00 per night may apply. Perhaps we could add contact for details?

The Shack is an optional extra as we really cannot rent it separately as it is in very close proximity to the deck, yard, etc. There would be no privacy for either if we did it that way.

The main house is small but could sleep 6: 2 master bedroom, 2 guest bedroom and 2 sleeping porch with trundle ideal for kids.

Then add the optional "shack" and sleep 2 more in a pull out IKEA sofa bed.

We really don't want 6 adults in the cottage - it is just too small so we are really just trying to suggest the 2 bed options.

What do you mean by equipment terminology under the part apart UK visitors?


Thanks and would appreciate any more you can contribute if your time allows!

Have a great day!

[Beachcondo]

Wow, beachcondo, congrats on having people want to book next year! I'm still working on this one!

Wendy

Thanks Wendy,
I wish it was because I am so very gifted at what I do, that people are standing in line to rent my condo (well maybe they are, but not at my price ).

We do get a lot of retired people from the midwest, Canada etc that want to escape the cold in January-April. Many of these "snowbirds" stay a month or three and if they like the place they will come back year after year.
If you are out looking less than a year in advance you are actually a bit late as Feb-Easter will be our peak season in this area.

So the easiest way to have people banging on your door a year in advance is to get a place on the Gulf Coast in Florida (probably the same on the east coast and the Keys as well, but I don't think Orlando experiences the same phenomena).

[CSE]

Terms that immediately pop out from your website that I don’t understand are:

Trundle bed and traditional sleeping porch.
I think a glass cooktop in U.K. English is a ceramic hob. But please check this.

[Guthrie]

Trundle bed is a single bed but has another single bed that rolls out from underneath.

Sleeping porch is very specific to certain architectural styles in the states of around the 20's and 30's. Most in the south and New England. When the weather was to hot to stay cooped up inside people often slept on the sleeping porch which had a lot of screened windows and often a breeze!

[La Chouette]

I really like the look of your website and it makes me feel like booking now, even though we've just returned from a month away from home!

I haven't had a thorough read, but what occurs to me about your location page (where I lingered a while!) is that there's an awful lot of different stuff there, and at one point I could see nothing but 2 very long paragraphs of text on my screen. Could you divide all this information up a bit and organise it onto different pages, and include some useful headers so people can quickly and easily find the information that would draw them to your place?

Just a thought..

Jan