Seeking feedback on our wesbite

[riovino]

e-Richard: Thank you for pointing out the border issue. I'll be sure to fix it for IE 7.

- Matt

[nboxall]

As many others have said already - a very professional looking site. We're all envious.
The color scheme is also very pleasant to the eye, very appropriate to match the stylish photo's you include.

On the down site, I agree with some other comments about the tight angles on a lot of the photo's. It's really difficult to get a good picture of what the property looks like, inside and out, from the pictures. It may put people off from booking if they think you're trying to hide something, but I doubt it. I think the overall quality of the site will pull in the bookings.

Good work - gives me some food for thought as well.

[Normandy Cow]

Hi Matt! Welcome to the forum!

I have to say that I LOVE the look of your place, what a great website. I think it looks very professional and upmarket, and as others have said, I think it would particularly appeal to your target market which I imagine to be young professionals, as opposed to families?

I agree with some of the comments about the photos, but then I presume you are easily able to make amendments to the site and can change some of them.

One small thing that I found a bit irritating (and it really is a small thing!), is that I was looking for the link to the home page and didn't see it at first, because I wasn't expecting to find it at the top-right of the screen - it's usually at the top-left.

Anyway, I wish you well with your rental.

PS - I do like the font! What is its name?

[riovino]

Hi Catherine,

Thank you for the review. Now that you mention it, the location of the Home link disturbs me too! In the next revision I'll move it to the upper-left.

On the next sunny day I'll to take another round of photos, both interior & exterior. I'll also explore some ways of making them larger without altering the overall feel of the site.

Regarding fonts, there are several:

* Menus & Titles (text that is Red or Gray in color) - this font is called Skia. Be careful using this font because browsers can't render it within normal html (you have to imbed the font within an image in order for browsers to handle it properly). The downside to this trick, as Peter pointed out, is that Search Engines don't understand text that's contained within an image file.

* Body (text that is Black) - this is Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica or sans-serif (depending on which one your browser prefers).

- Matt

[neohiro]

Good work!
I like it so much! Nice color! The coolest seen here until now!

Bye
Neohiro
casale-acquasparta

[Topcat]

Well, Matt, you're PR3 already, so you must be doing something right. It's broken my back just getting to PR1.

Pauline

[Giddy Goat]

On the next sunny day I'll to take another round of photos, both interior & exterior. - Matt

Hi Matt - just a quick response as that's all I have time for, but it's a seriously good-looking site for a delightful, and very smart property - like the way the website colours reflect the colours of the exterior, and elements of the interior too!

I expect this is already on your 'to do' list with the camera, but if not, apart from that glimpse of the river on your home page, since the setting is one of your main selling points in text terms, it needs to be supported by some pics.

Edit - Oops! I missed reading page 1 of the feedback and have just seen that others have made the same point...

[mon269]

Hi Matt,

I seem to have the same problem as Pauliner, whenever I found another request for a review, most of it has been said.

Very professional looking site, not for the family market, which is fine if that’s what you’re looking for. Great pics and I must say that I did not look for more exterior shots, but keep reading.

Maybe it is because of the sort of place we have that I was thinking all the time “what can I do on a lazy day?�. I was looking for some text telling me what the immediate area is like. Can I walk to a river? And what I can do once there? I looked into the location page, but only told me how to get there from several places. The information may be there, but it was not obvious to me.

I hope this helps.

BTW: the picture of the bottle of wine and the glasses in the events page is tilted and looks blurry. Maybe that’s the intention, but compared to all the other pics, nice and sharp, this one looks odd.

[riovino]

Pauline - what is PR1 and PR3?

[Topcat]

Oh, Riovino I'm so sorry. I hate people who talk in acronyms, only those have been bandied about so much on this site I took them for granted. PR is page rank.

An expert will tell you how significant that is or not, but if you download the Google toolbar it has a little icon on it that will give you your rank out of 10. It's something to do with how important Google thinks your page is. So to get PR3 at this stage is really good (I think!!).

Pauline

[riovino]

Now the PR1 & PR3 makes sense. In the first several months of being live my site was burried in google results. Over time it's moved up to about 60 for my main keywords...even at that who really scrolls down below 30 in a list of results

The only thing I can attribute the improvement to is time...I haven't done any optimization yet.

Matt

[greenfrog]

Hi Matt,

The site looks wonderful - very professional, nice photos. The property looks lovely too.

Others have commented on the photos so I'll just add that I would like a few that show the full room, or nearly full at any rate. I can't quite tell what the bathroom looks like, for example.

My only other comment would be on your headers - I agree with the observation that the Home link would be better in the upper left.
Also - and I'm sure I'll just sound silly saying this but perhaps someone else might think the same thing - having Reserve as your first header didn't make me think reservations. I confess my first thought was "it's on a reserve?" I think I would move the header re reservations to next to the Rates.

Just a couple of thoughts - overall, I thought it looked very good. I hope it brings in lots of bookings!

Elaine

[Garri]

Hey Matt, are you aware of the site 71 Miles ? It could be of interest to you ? Get yourself on their radar if you can. And also this site: http://calwineries.com/

Good work on your site, I like it. I think you've taken the sensible route: get the design and feel of your site right first of all. It takes such a huge amount of time and effort, and work done on that aspect at this point will spare you heartache in future. It's all about capturing people's attention, and I think you've done that successfully with your design.

Too many people are becoming over obsessed with SEO to the detriment of their designs and often usability. I'm not sure there's anything to gain by attaining high rankings if your site lacks panache with its design. People will give it 20 milliseconds, possibly less, before they're off like a shot to another website, a better one in their eyes.

Good design and usability is crucial.

[Giddy Goat]

I'm not sure there's anything to gain by attaining high rankings if your site lacks panache with its design. People will give it 20 milliseconds, possibly less, before they're off like a shot to another website, a better one in their eyes. Good design and usability is crucial.

I agree Garri, but it's surprising to find that not everyone here does. And then there's the dreaded VRBO...

[mon269]

People will give it 20 milliseconds, possibly less, before they're off like a shot to another website, a better one in their eyes.

But they need to be able to find that better looking one and that is why I think SEO is important.

The only thing I can attribute the improvement to is time...I haven't done any optimization yet.

Didn’t know it worked that way. Well done!