Out of lurking for Website review!

[Overboard]

Hello all,

I first want to say that I started reading this forum early 2006 when I was just ready to market my first vacation property. You've all helped me from choosing which sites to advertise on through to creating terms and conditions, thank you!

My property here in the US did fabulously and I now have a 2nd property in Edinburgh run by my mum. I just created a website for the Edinburgh property and was wondering what you all thought. Basically I found that my US property sold itself through pictures and we had an amazing first year. I'm not a big fan of text, but perhaps this Edinburgh property requires more? I know my websites are non existant when it comes to search engines, which is fine really as I basically use the websites to close a deal from people linking to them through rental sites. I've checked out quite a few European websites and there does seem to be quite indepth descriptions which I don't do, I wonder if the more competition a rental has the longer a description I should write? Anyway, any feedback appreciated... I am already planning on changing the 2nd castle picture in the header, I also wanted to keep the 2 websites similar in design. Cheers! http://www.edinburghvilla.com http://www.tullyhouse.com

[sunny by nature]

Hi Astra,

Welcome to the forum and the wonderful world of Edinburgh holidays.

Your site looks lovely and I'm sure you will do very well. I wouldn't worry about the lack of wordiness, it certainly doesn't detract from your site IMHO. My own adverts tend to be very wordy, but that's just me!

You are very lucky to have a Mum who's prepared to do such hard work. My own lovely Dad covered for us when we were on holiday this year and had a great time practising all the Japanese phrases he'd learned from Shogun on our politely smiling but frankly bemused guests (although if you heard the story from him rather than my Mum he was practically bilingual and the guests were dazzled by his brilliance!).

Good luck

[vrooje]

Astra,

Welcome to the forums!

First off, I think the front page is great in terms of wordiness. Too many words up front can scare a potential client off, and you've covered the basics. If you really want to cover everything, you might consider adding a simple sentence like "our prices start at $400 per night, or $1800 per week." That way, a user can get all the information they need from the front page. On the other hand, you may prefer to get people more excited about the house before telling them the price -- there are certainly two camps about this issue!

I think your home page could use a title, though. Even though you say you don't really care about search engine placement (which is probably for the best since you're using frames), I'm sure you wouldn't mind better rankings, right? The title of a page is a big part of its search engine rank, so it's very good to have a title that uses as many keywords (and is as informative) as possible.

You might also consider some alternate text using the (I think) <NOFRAMES></NOFRAMES> HTML tag on your index page. There aren't many browsers that don't use frames -- oh, except the browsers that the search engines use to index your site. So if you have alternate text (maybe just a paragraph), it could help you with placement, and when your page does come up on a search engine, it won't show your blurb-text as "this page uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them" or similar. Not very informative.

Quickie grammar issue: "The newly refurbished house designed by a renown architect" -- should this be "a renowned architect"? (By the way, it shows -- the house is beautiful!)

Also be aware that your use of words like "whilst" and "enquire" marks you as British. I don't know if that matters to you in relation to your target client base. I think it's probably next to impossible to avoid coming across as nationality-neutral -- you have to choose British or American English. I'm not sure whether I personally would want to change the text of my page to suit my client base, but I'd want to be aware of it.

I suggest that, at the bottom of your Facilities page, you include a link to the Additional Pictures page. When I visited that, my first thought was, "looks like a nice house, but too bad there aren't any pictures of the bedrooms." If you prefer not to put the bedroom pictures on the Facilities page, you should probably link to them so that a potential client doesn't have to search any harder for them than absolutely necessary.

Likewise, at the bottom of the Additional Pictures page, consider echoing the link to the exterior pictures that you have at the top of the page.

Overall I think your pages are well-organized and very informative, and the house looks absolutely lovely. Nice!

[A-two]

Hi Astra,
Welcome! Well, you certainly have done a stunningly gorgeous job on the VA house and it's website and the UK version is well on the way as well. I'd also like to see more photos of bedrooms in both houses if possible and alt tags for them all would also bring in the search engine traffic.

One small niggle on the US site which I wouldn't replicate on the UK site. The link to the weather isn't resolving here, just the box with a red X, so I clicked refresh thinking it could be my browser and ooops....it took me right back to the home page and I had find my place all over again. That's a navigation issue that needs to be fixed. You have masked every page as simply www. mydomain . com, whereas each page ought to be a different htm with a different title (which also helps SEO), so that page would become www. mydomain .com/availability.htm or whatever.

One small niggle on the guest side. I am ready to book this house it is so gorgeous and reasonably priced, except it sounds like I'm being asked to get down on my hands and knees to scrub the shower tray on the day I leave??? Hmmmm....sorry, not willing to do that. Of course I'm going to leave it neat and tidy, but on a rental at this level I would expect the owner to be responsible for cleaning the bathrooms at the end of the stay, whether this is included in the rent, or offered as a separate chargeable service.

Anyway, those issues aside, good job.

[A-two]

Also, let me add this....Great advice from Brooke as usual, but as a Brit living in America, I have a slightly different take on this aspect

Also be aware that your use of words like "whilst" and "enquire" marks you as British. I don't know if that matters to you in relation to your target client base. I think it's probably next to impossible to avoid coming across as nationality-neutral -- you have to choose British or American English. I'm not sure whether I personally would want to change the text of my page to suit my client base, but I'd want to be aware of it.

Don't aim to be neutral, it's not important, aim to make sense. Neither is it necessary to choose, mix and match is fine. Use one version or another as needed and both together where advantageous.

For "enquire" and "inquire", it doesn't matter, being understood by both, also all those words that have an extra "u" in them, like color/colour etc. Where it matters is words like "stove top" and "hob", which are not well known as being synonymous. The response will be "Huh?" and "Eh?" if you have used the wrong one for that visitor. So either avoid them, or use both on the same page in the same sentence, usually with an "and" inbetween makes sense. We accept payment by check and cheques. We have a stove top and hob with wall oven.

It has never occurred to me to change the text to appeal to any particular client base as I regard the whole world as my base, and I have always thought it far more important to write as naturally as possible to leave the impression of being a genuine person, not someone with a mask. We do however have an international section that explains some things that may otherwise cause confusion.

[Forrest Gump]

Aah, Edinburgh I have a flat there myself, isn't it such a beautiful city? I think you've got a powerful index page there with the great choice of pictures which convey what Edinburgh is all about. I would say the text on your index page is perfect - don't take any away and don't add to it. You've got all the info immediately needed right there.

I wonder though why you haven't added all the pictures to the facilities page and kept some for the additional photos page? Wouldn't it be better to have them all in one place rather than two seperate links?

I would perhaps change one of the castle photos to a shot of it at night - it looks beautiful at night, don't you think? Or you could even change one of the photos to a picture of your property?

That's my first impressions of the site, hope you get lots of bookings!

[Overboard]

Hi all,

This is great feedback, thank you! It's exactly what I need from people like yourself familiar with the rental business. I'm thinking I should add more pictures to the facilities page like you say. Until I get back to the Edinburgh house I'm lacking in JPGS though so maybe I'll add more Edinburgh/Scotland pictures to the 'additional pictures' page instead of the house pictures.

As far as my English. That's something I never even thought about until now! I've typed away without a care in the world.. though I did refrain from Och I the noo Jimmys and bonny hoose I expect that I too am subconsciously confused as to what's an American word such as 'hob' and what's British!

I am definitely going to work on those HTML and frame issues with my website. The title thing I was actually wondering about as I know I've changed it a few times where there is actually a description but it never seems to show up on the web.. I must be doing something wrong and investigate that further.

As far as the bathrooms, am I stricter than normal with the cleaning procedure at checkout? We've never had a complaint about the standards of cleanliness we expect and infact it's been nice that some people have laundered the bedding for us too! The cleaning the guests do never replaces the deep clean that we do between guests, it's more a surface wipe down of sinks, toilets etc.. I just feel that guests may respect the place more if they know the condition requirements at checkout and so far we've had some great people visit and only one bad apple.

[vrooje]

Ah! Joanna has it exactly right. I knew I didn't quite like my wording, and she worded it much better and pointed out what I didn't -- the fact that some things are simply called different names (e.g., a trolley in the US is a type of train).

There is actually an older thread regarding this: viewtopic.php?t=483

As you can see, I'm somewhat fascinated by the differences in UK and US English. I love Joanna's idea of using both in a sentence, separated by the word "and."

And wow, I didn't even notice the second link before! I just clicked on your "www" link, and not the links in your text. Oops! But I don't see any serious issues in the Edinburgh Villa site. You have two very nice properties.

Interestingly, you are only using frames in the Tully House site. And the way you're using frames seems unusual to me -- most of the time, frames are used for fixed layout purposes, but in this case it seems like simply a way to re-direct the user to another web site without actually re-directing them. Is that your design, or is it your web host? I notice that if I ask Firefox to show only the content frame, the URL becomes tullyhouse.homestead.com and I can then see appropriate page titles, as well as the names of the various pages that Joanna mentioned she couldn't see.

So for search engine purposes, the site tullyhouse.homestead.com probably has pretty good rankings, but tullyhouse.com just looks like a dead-end page. I'm curious to know why that's being done...

[Overboard]

When it comes to HTML/Frames etc I'm rather clueless. Does the Edinburgh site work fine? I created both websites the same way, the only difference is that Edinburgh villa's domain is registered with Homestead and Tullyhouse through a different host. I have now requested that Tullyhouse be transferred to tullyhouse.homestead.com. Do you think that could be the problem? I do plan on spending some time this weekend exploring frames and getting my head around this

[vrooje]

Astra,

This is most likely a web host issue, if you didn't do it yourself.

The website is already at tullyhouse.homestead.com, so what you might ask them to do is to instead transfer it to tullyhouse.com. If you paid for a full web hosting service, including your domain name, they are doing you a disservice by hosting you in this way, because you'll get no search engine exposure.

I'd be interested to know what kind of hosting package you set up with them...

[TravelPixel]

I think this is ok for a small rental property actually. The images are optimised and of good size and the overall feel of the site is inviting.

Perhaps the colours are a bit too defensive but this is nicely offset by the rich photos.

Probably the next step is to do some onpage optimisation and begin to draw some traffic from the search engines for your specific market.

Dave

[Steve]

Really nice site, not sure you need to do anything else, except maybe stick it on a few search engines. Depends what you want, shouldn't think you'll have much of a problem during the Edinburgh Festival in August though as the city is packed to the rooftops.

[halcyon999]

Hi - I like the general feel of the website - I personally prefer a sans serif font, not sure if you'd like to try it?

Also, really like the header graphics at the top, maybe would look more 'consistent' if the image of Edinburgh Castle was without a border?

HTH,
Darren

[Partridge]

Wow, love Tulley House, superb. Would like to see pics of bathrooms but maybe that's just me.

[Overboard]

Thanks all for the added input and I may look into taking more bathroom pictures.. I dont have a great camera for smaller rooms so Im thinking about buying a new one.. Time now to fathom out how search engines work