First website review

[Uncle Fester]

Hi. This my first post here but I've been lurking a long while and spent some time reading all your valuable advice before creating my webpage. I'd be grateful if you have a quick look and give me some pointers. Thanks

[Harborfields]

Skip the splash page and just go right to your home page.

[Jimbo]

Excellent gallery of high-quality, atmospheric and informative exterior photographs of your property and its surrounding location that really draw me in. Unfortunately, the interior shots aren't in the same league. Perhaps there's a subliminal message here - don't waste time indoors flossing your teeth when there's all that sunshine and spectacular scenery waiting to be enjoyed. And I would have liked a few additional pictures of local attractions and events to leaven the mix. Stylish webite (even though I'm not usually a fan of dark websites for holiday property).

So, stop lurking Uncle Fester, and come and join the party.

Jim

[CarolineH]

What a beautiful place - makes me want to come on holiday!!

The images were rather slow to load - I am out in the sticks with a poor broadband width, but I can't be the only country bumpkin that has this problem - when I look at the size of the images they are rather big - could you resize them to their actual size on the page, that way, they would load more quickly.

On the gallery page, I started to click on the images and when I go forward to the next image, it springs up to the top of the page and I have to scroll down again to see each photo. It works without this problem if I hit the slideshow button, but I didn't see this until later - perhaps you could make the slideshow button more prominent?

I love the background for the site, but on every page I have to scroll down in order to get past the header to see the details on the page that I have selected.

I hope this helps - welcome to LMH and good luck for 2012!

[CSE]

Yep skip the first page.
Have clickable link to the headers on the 3 columns so that you can expand on the information already given.
Why are there two sets on menus?
I only looked at one page but there are quite a number of coding errors/warnings.
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1 ... index.html
here are the problems with the CCS
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/vali ... index.html
I would personally like to see the main frame sit right at the top of my browser rather than having the three colours showing. Why are they there?
You have no description – keyword meta tags no robots text and a fair few other things that would help with your SEO.
Presentation (overall) is good.

[kendalcottages]

For me, the top three images are taking up too much space. Every time I go to a new page, I'm having to reach for the scroll bar each time. It would be nicer if I didn't have to do that.

[Uncle Fester]

Thanks for taking the time to review my website and provide some constructive feedback

As you can guess, I'm a bit better at taking photos than I am at building websites!

The site was built using a preformatted template from Streamline, so I've not too much control over some things.
The coloured bars at the top are part of the template, so I can't change those.
I've used their SEO optimisation add on, so I'm suprised there's no evidence of keyword meta tags and robot stuff.

The errors reported by casasantoestevo mean nothing to me I'm afraid I'd have thought a preformatted template would avoid that sort of thing, which is why I went with it (That and I've no idea how HTML works!)

The main irritant is that I can't work out how to get the homepage as www.serendipity-villa.co.uk and not www.serendipity-villa.co.uk/index.html, which it does currently, and is why I've had to insert the crappy splash page at the front.
If someone could recommend a descent WYSIWYG editor which might be easier to use I may have a look at that.

[sallyandalan]

Hi,

Looks good to me, definitely makes the villa look appealing. Just 2 things I noticed:
- There is too much wasted space at the top of the page, so I had to scroll down after clicking on any links. Either set the links to scroll down automatically, or ideally cut down on the pictures along the top.
- Maybe just my opinion, but I suggest a different email address, the yahoo.com one doesn't look professional.

I think the idea of providing a PAYG mobile phone is a great idea, I might borrow that.

Regards,
Alan

[CSE]

I have just looked over your coding Yes you have got the headers as you stated they are not showing up because the first fault encountered is you do not declare the doctype. There is link about this on the W3 error page I gave you a link to. If my SO programme, which checks these sort of things cannot find certain data then it will be detrimental to your website as search engines will not read it correctly either.

The best WYSIWYG editor on the market is Dreamweaver. But the cost may put some off. Maybe try and purchase a second hand one that is a few years out of date. That will lower the cost.

There have been several threads about packages to design websites. WP gets a good mention so do some other but they are usually hosted too.

[Margalide]

If someone could recommend a descent WYSIWYG editor which might be easier to use I may have a look at that.

Our website came with a built-in WYSIWYG editor, I just click on some text I want to change and type away, looks exactly like it should.

The best WYSIWYG editor on the market is Dreamweaver. But the cost may put some off. Maybe try and purchase a second hand one that is a few years out of date. That will lower the cost.

We looked at that when looking at building our website (may have been in a tutorial here), but you're right it's around €500 which seemed a bit much just to get started.

Is WP short for Wordpress?
Friends of ours use that for their gîte but it looked a bit unfriendly to use and they don't have online booking which we wanted. To get a similar website from their designer was going to be €800 and €75 a year to host it. We got ours for £144 a year including putting our details in, mostly from our french connections listing and what we emailed them. Took about 4 hours from buying it to me pressing the Open button - seems so long ago now but this time last week we didn't have a website!

Ros

[sarahparker]

Your website is good but I guess you need to test it in all browsers I find the template breaking. Also you can improve internal linking for your site and having a site blog with wp is a gr8 idea.

Also create a facebook page and change titles for your pages

[burdy]

Website looks good.
I agree about the opening page - not necessary.

I don't understand the pricing .....
"Prices are for up to 2 guests
An additional charge of £35 per person, per week will be made"

Does that mean the prices are more than advertised.
If that is the case, why not just up them by £35 per person and remove that sentence.

I think it could be clearer.

BURDY

[Windy]

In Firefox and Safari (at least) the facilities_1.html page has weird black blocking in the title image.

[Uncle Fester]

Your website is good but I guess you need to test it in all browsers I find the template breaking. Also you can improve internal linking for your site and having a site blog with wp is a gr8 idea.

Also create a facebook page and change titles for your pages

Thanks for the suggestions.
I've already got a Facebook page which I update reasonably regularly.
Can you clarify what wp is please as the blog idea sounds good

[Uncle Fester]

Website looks good.
I agree about the opening page - not necessary.

I don't understand the pricing .....
"Prices are for up to 2 guests
An additional charge of £35 per person, per week will be made"

Does that mean the prices are more than advertised.
If that is the case, why not just up them by £35 per person and remove that sentence.

I think it could be clearer.

BURDY

The prices shown are for two guests. I wanted to reduce the price for couples as our overheads (air con, electric, laundry etc are less) and expecting two guests to pay the same as four or six is likely to put them off.

By adding an additional cost per guest charge, this balances our increased costs.
I agree it could be clearer, but I'm not sure the best way to go about it