Site in the Caribbean for review!

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.
maisoui1
Posts: 34
Joined: Fri Jan 26, 2007 6:05 pm

Site in the Caribbean for review!

Post by maisoui1 »

Hi all,

My site is www.MakeItJamaica.com. Our villa has 6 (now 8 bedrooms). We market primarily to multi-generational families and small groups. I'd like to get more corporate business for small group meetings or retreats. We also do weddings.

The main selling points of the villa?
It is one of the few luxury villas in Jamaica of that size - this is especially true when you consider our amenities. We also have an on-site spa which is a selling point. Compared to other villas in our category we are not as expensive as the others. The drawback though is we are not directly on the beach and many, if not most, people want beachfront. We are about a 3 minute walk. I obviously can't move the villa so I am trying to attract people who want what we have to offer.

The competition in our area is very stiff and I need to attract the right people to my site. I'd appreciate your feedback on the site.

Thanks
Sherry
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Garri
Posts: 1689
Joined: Mon Jul 11, 2005 7:26 pm

Post by Garri »

Sherry, good informative website and a great looking holiday home.

Things I like about your site:

1. Footer containing a call action i.e. booking enquiry. Idea: use the footer to remind people of your special pricing deal.

Also, the link to your booking form is an email address. Personally I wouldn't click on that. Think about wording it more explicitly like: Make a booking enquiry.

Also also, the villa comparison link is pointless because there's just data pertaining to Villa 1, the others have nothing to compare.

Also also also, who bookmarks stuff to their browsers these days? Why not put a save to del.icio.us button? Social bookmarking is more effective than browser bookmarks (which is why Yahoo! paid $30mil for del.icio.us - they got it cheap!)

2. Floor plan with corresponding photos. Are they meant to appear as I mouse-over the rooms? If so, they don't on OSX running Firefox. If they're not meant to then it might be a nice idea to explore as I have to click and then click back - a bit tedious when you're looking at all the rooms in the plan.

As far as the 3 minute walk to the beach is concerned, what about making that a feature? ;-)

What I mean is, describe the walk. Make it a selling point, if you can. Is it picturesque? Are there things to do along the way? I'm sure it's a more charming 3 minute walk than many of the 3 minute walks I've encountered in London on a cold drizzling morning ;-)
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vrooje
Posts: 3202
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 2:48 am
Location: Burgundy, France

Post by vrooje »

Sherry,

I haven't had time to do a full review, but I did have a quick look and had a few thoughts, so let me share them.

First, what a beautiful home.

I think your front page is very well done -- with all the necessary information included at a glance, except perhaps the price. For a large, luxury villa such as this, though, I can understand why you wouldn't necessarily include price right off. If you were to do that, you might phrase it as "you can rent this luxury villa for prices as low as $100 per person per night" or something similar.

I'm a little confused as to why the link in your header goes to the floor plan page and not back to the home page. The latter is fairly standard, though the floor plan link is, I think, a bit more informative.

Also, in the menus, your link back to home is only in the Villa menu. Consider making the link back to the homepage a top-level link in your top navigational menu, for ease of navigation, and since presumably the home page is really in its own category.

I love the clickable floor plan -- I think this is a great alternative to a virtual tour (those are often technologically unavailable to many web users). I do think, however, that your photos here and elsewhere on the site could use captions. In some cases, it's just a nice add-on, but in others it would really help explain the photo. For example, clicking on the atrium photo leads to... a picture of fish. Without a caption, I can't decide whether your atrium has a koi pond (lovely) or whether the link just goes to the wrong photo (oops).

In addition to captions, I recommend filling in ALT and TITLE tags for your photos. The ALT tag text will show up if your photo doesn't load for some reason, and the TITLE tag text is supposed to pop up as "extra information" when a user hangs their mouse over the picture (many browsers will do this with the alt text if the title text is missing, but not all). Both are supposed to really help with search engine placement, so that's another incentive.

Last thing (I have more -- mostly positive -- to say, but I'm late for an appointment): have you given thought to what will happen to a user if they come to your web site and, for whatever reason, can't use your dropdown menus? I can use them just fine, but it seems as though if I couldn't, I couldn't navigate anywhere on your site. So it might be a good idea to have an alternate way of navigating the site. That could be text-only links at the bottom of each page, or you might make each top-level menu item clickable, which could just take the user to a simple page linking to each sub-topic page. I don't think you'd have a problem here with search engines reading your menus -- just the (very) occasional user.

Overall, this is a beautiful site (and I think you've done a nice job of not making the 3-minute walk to the beach a problem; I also like Garri's idea). Well done!
Brooke
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Garri
Posts: 1689
Joined: Mon Jul 11, 2005 7:26 pm

Post by Garri »

any come back on this? I don't see any of the excellent advice implemented ;-)
maisoui1
Posts: 34
Joined: Fri Jan 26, 2007 6:05 pm

website in Caribbean for review

Post by maisoui1 »

Garri wrote:any come back on this? I don't see any of the excellent advice implemented ;-)
It has been a while but we have managed to do some things based on your suggestions. Thanks for your excellent suggestions and for taking the time to do a review of my site. I do appreciate it. So far we have worked on improving the floor plan. It is more user friendly and does have captions for the photos. I'm still thinking of how to describe the walk in a nicer way. We have also re done the spa page to make it have a more "spa" feel. Still a few more things to do based on the suggestion - for example, we have to look into deli.cious - not sure how to do that. (I'm sure I spelled that name wrong:)

Sherry
www.MakeItJamaica.com
Musetta
Posts: 1892
Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2006 6:11 pm
Location: Campania, Italy/NJ, USA
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Post by Musetta »

so...only took a peek...but it is really beautiful! :-) I would really, really stress the fact that it is all-inclusive and yet private...you're so right about all the competition...but...seems that if you can tap into some of the all-inclusive market it would help :-) I, persoanally, HATE all-inclusives....but wouold love it in youor Villa, know what I mean?? The phots are lovely :-)

The only thing I would change...and others may disagree is the very first sentance..."The name, Mais Oui, pronounced “May wee�, which translated from French means “But Yes" rubbed me the wrong way...no good reason really...just that I think anyone who is booking a home for over $1000/night (and most who are not) knows how to pronounce Mais Oui :-) and what it means....I would tone it down maybe...Mais Oui, or French for But Yes...or Mais Oui (But Yes)...please don't take it the wonrg way...it really is the only thing that jumped out at me.

p.s. don't know what nationality your target guests are...but I would stress big-time how easy/quick it is to get t Jamaica from NY...compared to other luxury Villas simmilar in the Carribbean....I think big groups will be comparing with homes on other ispands as well.
maisoui1
Posts: 34
Joined: Fri Jan 26, 2007 6:05 pm

website in Caribbean for review

Post by maisoui1 »

Thanks for the suggestion. We will stress the all-inclusive more. There aren't that many villas offering that in a relative sense so it is a good niche. Just the other day, I came across 2 others that started doing it - offering all-inclusve. They have fewer structural amenities than we do - they both have only a pool. Every other copyable perk that we offer has been copied by these two places. One even copied some of the wording - but at least they paraphrased some of it. They cost less than we do but are not really in our category.

I thought that also re the name but surprisingly more than 50% of the people can't pronounce the name and don't know what it means. For a while we considered changing the name for that reason - but that is no longer an option.

So far 90% of the guests come from the US. I am trying to figure out which sites in the UK/Europe to use for pay per click - I did a post asking that question. Have to check to see if any responses.

Didn't think of the groups comparing other islands. I thought if they wanted Jamaica they would focus on that. I had pulled some of the PPC with caribbean in the keywords. I should look at those stats to see whether they were getting clicks.

Thanks again
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