Is my new website a tad too wacky?

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Bridg1t
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Joined: Fri Aug 05, 2011 7:22 pm
Location: UK

Is my new website a tad too wacky?

Post by Bridg1t »

Dear All,

After dithering for England on the matter, I have eventually got an old (boy)friend to do this website for me. He's very old inasmuch as we were together at 17, and split at 20-almost 30 years ago.

http://www.oxfordvacationrental.com

Obviously I'm very grown up now and I hope I didn't regress too much with silly pictures and awful puns. In all seriousness it has to work but I don't want anything *vanilla* and I do say that my properties are quirky (they are but in a nice way). So have I inserted a bit too much of my wacky side?

So far, I've asked a repeat US visitor who has said he likes it, and 2 friends- one of whom loves the blower picture and pun and one of whom hates it. Oh- but I have managed to check and blower doesn't mean anything awful in US. Funky does, and I took that out of one of my slidey picture captions!

Anyway, would you good people be kind enough to tell me what you think. Ahead of your comments, my own observations and aspirations are:

1-a slidey photo thing on tourist info with pictures of Oxford and number of minutes walk from one property or another.

2-I've also registered the url's oxford holiday.com and .co.uk and will use the former, when it's migrated from where it is to winhost who my XBF used.

3-Is there any techy stuff I should convey to XBF. He asked me to send it to all my friends and if adjustments needed I should ask on what devices and browsers. I can already see on my iPhone that that the contact and about page need re-sizing.

4-I'm thinking about a discount page for last minute bookings, but still dithering and may just offer on HL, eBay etc.

Thanks so much in advance

Bridget
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Casscat
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Post by Casscat »

Your apartments are lovely, and I don't think the narrative on your site is 'wacky' at all. I would probably substitute the word wireless for WiFi as wireless conjures up an image of some dusty old transistor radio! Also do non-Brits understand the word 'loo'?
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petemcveigh
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Post by petemcveigh »

I thought your site had a great 'feel' and a nice, natural narrative style and I did not feel it did not come across as wacky.

Browsed on Safari on a MacBook Pro and everything looked good.

Genuinely felt the site made the properties very appealing.

Pete
" Do I really look like a guy with a plan?"
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barbersdrove
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Post by barbersdrove »

Not whacky at all I didn't think. Very nice in fact. I would book
A cream cake a day keeps the wrinkles at bay:)
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kevsboredagain
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Post by kevsboredagain »

Not wacky at all but as you've already discovered, it's not mobile friendly at all. Just resizing to fit your own iPhone probably won't be enough. What about old iphones with low res displays? Having a menu on the RHS is probably the worst choice you could have made to be mobile friendly.

I think I make this comment for every website on here. Your images are too large, so the pages load slowly. If you want a 720 pixel image then you should make one that size and not upload a bigger one and allow the browser to rescale it for you. Your visitor is being made to download the full sized images.

Nothing wrong with the content though apart from maybe needing a little more detail. The photos are great and show the places off well.
Bridg1t
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Location: UK

Post by Bridg1t »

Thanks so much for your feedback folks. I'll compile a list and send to XBF.

Casscat- I agree totally with your point. Wireless sounds wrong, obvious when you say, but I wouldn't have noticed.

Kevsboredagain- thank you for those techy points; I'll ask him to make the photo's smaller. Do you have a size you recommend?

I was also going to ask a general point about calendars. I used availcheck as someone recommended them (a friend also with 3 FHL's), but wondered if there are any outstanding ones people use.

Thanks so much everyone for responses, and glad no diplomatic incidents with my lingo. I've just emailed another US guest to ask about the "loo" word.

All the best,
Bridget
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kevsboredagain
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Post by kevsboredagain »

Bridg1t wrote:
Kevsboredagain- thank you for those techy points; I'll ask him to make the photo's smaller. Do you have a size you recommend?
I think you have misunderstood my comment. The images simply need to be the maximum size that you want to display them as in your web page.

For example, I could have an image 500x500 on my hard drive. I could put that into a web page and tell it to display the image as an 80x80 thumbnail. You would see an 80x80 image on your web page and for the casual observer all would look fine. However the browser first had to download your 500x500 image and recsale it. Do this a few times and your pages really start to load slowly. In my example 39 times slower! You will only notice this the first time you view the page, as after that, the images are in cache.

I could equally make my web page display the same image as 1000x1000. Again the browser would rescale the supplied image according to the size I’ve given in the code for the page. The result would be a blurry image.

With Firefox you can see the info on any image by right clicking on it and selecting View Info. It will tell you the orginal size and the rescaled size.
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964kevin
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Post by 964kevin »

I agree with Kevsboredagain and would add that looking at it on FireFox, shrinking the page it didn't appear as though the pages were responsive, that might help the mobile market.

Kevin
http://www.encantada-vacation.com

Our little piece of Florida, never get tired of being there. Love it and the people to bits.
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