New Website...May I have reviews?

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.
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davhill
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New Website...May I have reviews?

Post by davhill »

Hello,

I've now made the new website for my property fully functional, including online booking. Please may I have some thoughts on it? It's at www.valleyviewkendal.co.uk


Answers...

1. Which are your target markets in order of importance? Examples: families with children, retired couples, newlyweds, students, big groups, walkers, surfers, birdwatchers, etc.

Couples, any age, perhaps with older children, up to teens.

2. What would you say is the single biggest selling point of your rental property?

The location - easy to get around the Lakes but with good local services.

3. What are the other reasons why someone should want to stay in your place instead of another in the same area?

Quiet spot, picnic area, barbecue, secure cycle/gear storage, parking.

Thanks in advance, folks :D

David
Property owner in Burneside, Kendal, Cumbria
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CSE
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Post by CSE »

I always look at the issues that will affect your web visitors experience. I also usually just point out the coding errors. Anything I do not mention is ok or good.

First thing that hit me was the first page is far too long, along with a few others.
The heading gif file takes time to load thus slows down the loading of all pages. I think it could be that the images are quite large and they are not being cached.

SEO talk:
There is no robots text; no site map; no doctype; some alt text to images are missing; not heading text; meta description tag missing; meta tag keywords is also missing. The later is debatable if Google uses them these days.
Here is a list of errors found on the first page:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http: ... ndal.co.uk
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/vali ... Findex.htm
Other pages will also need to be checked for coding errors.

Good luck.
Never try to out-stubborn your guests.
Margaret
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Post by Margaret »

I was confused by the lake view photo and the valley view name of the house. Do you actually get that lake view from the house? if not, my guess is that you will get a lot of disappointed guests.

Also I think your headline says something like 'Welcome to Valley View House website'. I would just say 'Welcome to Valley View House'.
galtezza
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Post by galtezza »

David
I am not yet running my holiday rental, as we are in the process of renovating 4 holiday cottages prior to starting the business. So I can only give you feedback from the perspective of a punter, and from my general experience of being a marketing director for the last 2 years.
The first impression is good - the colours of the website are really good, the main photo is very attractive, and it is a very clean layout. The photos of the apartment have been taken well, and fit with your key priorities (attracting couples with quiet location).
On the downsides - the front page is very long, and although I had no problem loading it on my mac, it meant that I felt I had seen everything you had to offer by the end of that page. Its always difficult to get the balance between grabbing peoples attention, whilst inviting them to explore more. Perhaps an overview with one or two tempting photos might make people want to look into the site further - investing more time and more emotion in the experience.
It also meant that when I did explore further I expected more photos in each of the other sections, but was then disappointed to just have lots of text and detail, without any more photos.
The Valleyview name was a bit confusing. I think the Lakes photo is beautiful and definitely tempted me, but then if the apartment is called Valley View, and you refer in the text to it 'overlooking the Kent valley' then maybe a photo of the actual view from the apartment will help clarify.
The only other thing, is a query on the font used on the initial description of the apartment on the front page, 'delightful holiday flat with 2+2 accomodation'. The calligraphy style fonts are always quite difficult to read and when really small, make it much harder. Your eye is drawn to the 'how to book and see availability' section, before you have actually read what the product is, as the calligraphy text recedes visually. You have also used it on the section for guests comments, where again the text is too small to make out clearly. Hope that helps..... It looks like a lovely apartment with tons of facilities nearby.
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kendalcottages
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Post by kendalcottages »

Hi David

The first thing that hits me is a lot of the content is bleeding off to the right of the screen for me (on a 1024 x 768 resolution which is fairly common). This means I have to use the scrollbar at the bottom, and drag right and left to read each line. My guess is that it's the width of the top image that is causing this to happen.

Paul
Kendal Holiday Cottages Ltd., Kendal, Cumbria - between the Lake District & the Yorkshire Dales.
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Nemo
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Post by Nemo »

Yes, I am having to use the bottom scroll bar to view the site, so that needs to be remedied.

A few too many buttons; I would expect some of the items to be sub pages such as the inventory.

Contact is the second button down; I would expect that to come near the end, as I wouldn't be contacting you until I've looked through most of the information.

Gallery? Even if you use some small photos in amongst the text (and yours I feel are too large as the first page is so long) then I would expect to find several within one page to browse. You have loads on your holiday rental advert, so why aren't they here unless I've missed them?

Other payment methods "us" instead of "use".

A few starters to be going on with!
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davhill
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Post by davhill »

Thanks, Peeps :D

Useful crits here, thank you. It's been a long haul inducing the site to even work (Frontpage 2003 :twisted:), However, I can now redo/refine it.

I think I'll have to lose the header shot...it's a pic of 'a' valley but not the Valley View valley...misleading, as you say. Hopefully, this'll get rid of a couple of other problems too.

Meanwhile, coding is a pig anyway...I'll work on it :roll:

Thanks again, folks,

David
Property owner in Burneside, Kendal, Cumbria
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kendalcottages
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Post by kendalcottages »

Frontpage has never really been much cop (imho)... I can't imagine the 2003 version is any better. I don't know if it still does nowadays but it used to have a habit of adding far too much HTML code.

You might like to browse this thread on another forum:
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/show ... hp?t=16592
Kendal Holiday Cottages Ltd., Kendal, Cumbria - between the Lake District & the Yorkshire Dales.
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davhill
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Post by davhill »

Hmm. It may just be me but I've tried Dreamweaver and found it pretty impenetrable...not really WYSIWYG.

AFAIK, Frontpage was discontinued in 2003. Thing is, I know it a bit, as I've used it before.

Anyways, I've also added online booking (via PayPal as Barclays have been so useless) and gone with Holiday Lettings as well as HR...the booking calendar is very sparse right now.

Pressing on regardless :wink:
Property owner in Burneside, Kendal, Cumbria
BlueSkyBlueSea
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Post by BlueSkyBlueSea »

Hi,

Looks like you have a great place there in a lovely setting. However, I don't think your website is doing it justice.

I would change the picture you have used as your "header" image to one that isn't used elsewhere already. The first thing I see on your homepage is tghat picture followed soon after by that picture again only bigger. I would also try and find a picture that you could crop so that it fits the width of your website but is quite short to take up less room.

I would be consistent in image sizes on the first page if you really want that layout as it just does not look neat to me and be consistent with where your text appears against the pictures. To give yourself more room you could think about moving your menu from the left to the top as this will provide you with more space down the rest of the page which I think looking at your design you need.

I would lose the counter - only you need to know what's happening on your website and this can be much better achieved through integrating Google Analytics which is free. You also need to think about your link text - click here should be avoided at all costs.

On to the coding. Avoid using Frontpage - even if it is the "latest" version from 2003. It was written when things like web standards were only considered by the minority. Now it should be considered by everyone. I think it was the second poster who gave you many tips on how to improve your code but I would go further. If this is your main business, or even if it isn't and you want to be profitable, you need to be seen, by Google if at all possible. Your code is a good example of how to be ignored by Google. Your title tag says Master - are you trying to be found for the keyword "Master"? I didn't think so. You have not declared document type, you link to a css file then use inline styles to bloat your code, you have used a table for layout, there is no meta description, no alt tags, using the html <li> tage with no <ul> and sadly the list could go on and on. I appreciate that you are not a coder but your lack of experience will hurt your bookings potential.

I would do one of two things. Learn Dreamweaver but do not go anywhere near the WYSIWYG view. Stay in code view if you want to get the best out of it. Or alternatively, get someone else to do it for you. I am constantly surprised how many people do their own websites when it is probably these days the second most important part of the business after the property itself.

Sorry if any of that sounds harsh but I do mean it to be constructive. Good luck into the future.
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kendalcottages
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Post by kendalcottages »

davhill wrote:AFAIK, Frontpage was discontinued in 2003. Thing is, I know it a bit, as I've used it before.
Frontpage really is a potentially dangerous product, I think, for the reasons outlined by BlueSkyBlueSea. I'm guessing you have some knowledge of how to use it, but possibly don't realise how ugly the code can be and how detrimental this can be upon your site. Getting your site to look right for casual browsers is one thing, but you've also got to consider getting it to look right 'behind the scenes', so to speak, for the likes of Google.
davhill wrote:...the booking calendar is very sparse right now.
Sorry to hear this. I have mentioned you to a couple of people we couldn't accommodate, but they never came back. Will keep bearing you in mind.
BlueSkyBlueSea wrote:On to the coding. Avoid using Frontpage - even if it is the "latest" version from 2003. It was written when things like web standards were only considered by the minority. Now it should be considered by everyone. I think it was the second poster who gave you many tips on how to improve your code but I would go further. If this is your main business, or even if it isn't and you want to be profitable, you need to be seen, by Google if at all possible. Your code is a good example of how to be ignored by Google. Your title tag says Master - are you trying to be found for the keyword "Master"? I didn't think so. You have not declared document type, you link to a css file then use inline styles to bloat your code, you have used a table for layout, there is no meta description, no alt tags, using the html <li> tage with no <ul> and sadly the list could go on and on. I appreciate that you are not a coder but your lack of experience will hurt your bookings potential.
I second all of this. Well... all except the bit that suggests using a table for layout. I assume you're suggesting it's better to use CSS to control this, but I'm quite a fan of tables really for being able to control positioning. I don't think they should necessarily be considered wrong or a bad thing.
Kendal Holiday Cottages Ltd., Kendal, Cumbria - between the Lake District & the Yorkshire Dales.
BlueSkyBlueSea
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Post by BlueSkyBlueSea »

kendalcottages wrote: I second all of this. Well... all except the bit that suggests using a table for layout. I assume you're suggesting it's better to use CSS to control this, but I'm quite a fan of tables really for being able to control positioning. I don't think they should necessarily be considered wrong or a bad thing.
They should be considered both bad and wrong unless you are specifically using a table for ... tabular data!! Using a table for layout purposes these days is at best lazy at worst harmful. It is best to use semantic markup that best describes your content and avoid a huge amount of code bloat at the same time then you will be better off learning to control the style of your page with css. This should be kept in a seperate file so that when Google comes along to look at your content, amazingly it will find on your page only content and not how you wish your page to look to human visitors.
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Post by CSE »

I am personally horrified you are still using or trying to use such an old programme to write your website.
Things are moving on and if your website is to last you a few years to come you should look at using HTML 5. This is with us now and is setting some new standards now, for the years to come. There are several postings about suggestions on what software to use. I found recently that is uses Firefox 4. It is free and is WYSIWIG.
If DW is daunting then the coast will be too. I would also suggest you purchase an older copy of Dreamweaver to save on the costs. At least you will have a good enough programme. Don't forget this is your shop window.
Never try to out-stubborn your guests.
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kendalcottages
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Post by kendalcottages »

BlueSkyBlueSea wrote:They should be considered both bad and wrong unless you are specifically using a table for ... tabular data!! Using a table for layout purposes these days is at best lazy at worst harmful.
And to that I'll respond with an extract from:
http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2009/02 ... egone.html (which I think is a good read for the seemingly less popular pro-tables stance).
So, I don't ever want to read how web designers who don't use pure CSS in their layouts are lazy, stupid, don't care about their craft, backwards or don't bathe properly. Never again. People who post such things online are heretofore to be known as CSS Trolls and are to be banished from the internets for all time. Begone yea vile fiends!
;)

Seriously, I'll confess to being perhaps a little out of touch here. There does seem to be a consensus out there now that's in agreement with what you've come back and posted.

I've now read the arguments for CSS versus tables, but previously I've rarely found CSS behaves as I want it to properly. It sounds like maybe some more work on that front is required...
Kendal Holiday Cottages Ltd., Kendal, Cumbria - between the Lake District & the Yorkshire Dales.
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davhill
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Post by davhill »

OK, meanwhile back at the can of worms :wink:

I used FP2003 because (a) I own it and (b) I've used it before. I have access to someone else's Dreamweaver, on his machine.

Now, the site (reverted to the original header, with a rider that the heading shot is not the view in 'Valley View') works in that customers can navigate around and use the links.

I tried importing the whole of the code into DW, which sort of worked but I think it retained most of the 'nasty' code from FP.

Working from scratch in DW, I find it not too WYSIWYG. For example, I can't select the fonts/sizes I want, nor a background colour/image. :roll:

So, where to go? Is there a (free or online) WYSIWYG tool I could use to start from scratch? Or is there something that will strip out the duff code in FP, or even DW?

As things stand, at least I have a working site that people can look through. That's better than nothing and searching 'Kendal self catering' brings up my Google maps entry in Google itself.

Any ideas greatfully received :)
Property owner in Burneside, Kendal, Cumbria
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