Lay My Hat

Now that I've started advertising on Homelidays, I am hoping to attract the French Market so I have decided to create a French version of my website.

This is a very cut down version of the English site, but I hope it will help. By keeping the text to a minimum, I hope to translate it into a number of other languages in due course.

In the meantime, I'd appreciate some feedback (however brutal!!! )

In particular, my text. I do speak French, but I know that I must have made some mistakes and grammatical errors, so please point any of these out...

www.gitenormandie.wordpress.com

Hello,

I really don't want to suggest that I speak fluent French - I found a 'native' to translate mine and totally admire anyone who is fluent enough to do it themselves. However I picked up a couple of spelling errors on the front page:

près (was missing accent)
précédents (Was missing first 'e' and accents)

Also, I thought 'coming and going' translated as 'va et vien' looked a bit odd, so I looked it up on wordreference.com(a brilliant site to see how things are written in context, particularly if you do a search in the forum) and

'va-et-vient' was suggested, which is practically what you said anyway.

I was wondering if it might be good to put how many rooms you have and how many you can accommodate on the front page?

Something like..
"Nous pouvons accueillir jusqu'à ?? personnes, le gîte disposant de ?? chambres confortables, dont ?? dotées d'une salle d'eau privative"

Anyway, your place looks amazing and the site looks very inviting. Feel free to pm me if you want any tips on French keywords - my translator gave me some good ones.

Bonne chance!
Anna

Dear Anna,
Thanks for taking the time to point these out. I have now changed the website as per your suggestions.

I've just had a look at your website and I must say, I am impressed! It has inspired me to further develop my french site once we get back from our holidays...

Bonjour mon amie

I did have a look yesterday but was trop pressé to post a review

I love the colours and the lay out. It seems a perfect example or less is more - the photos are doing the talking and they are such good photos that they are selling the dream straight away.

I don't like the pop up windows over your main picture and your links - it took me a minute to realise I had to click again to open a new page.

Thanks Aysen - now much inspired to do a French version - I will reduce the text and use more photos on the french version. I hope it brings you lots of lovely French guests

I agree it is easier to keep things to a minimum, but you are not giving many facts about your property, number of bedrooms, bathrooms etc. The French like to know how many square metres they are getting for their money and they love a BBQ and being in the garden too.
Lovely photos, as usual, but the contact tab and the calendar links didn't work for me.

Thanks Enid and LV - it's good to get a different viewpoint, I'd never thought about those Wordpress Snap previews. They seemed a good idea when I first switched on that feature, but looking at them from a different viewpoint I agree that they must be off putting if you don't know what they do! So I have removed them (and am going to do so from the English version too).

LV, could you try the Contact and Planning links again please? (and could you try sending me a test enquiry?)

I've also added a bit more info on the home page.

Merci!

Much better

Not fair.... I'm trying to write some comments, but the website improves as I write it, and I have to keep deleting my post

I think its a lovely site and has a very welcoming "feel" to it, but the criticisms above need to be retrofitted to the English pages as well (or have you done that already too !!). The website visitor has 2 seconds to glance at the home page to check if they can see what is on offer and if the proposition is of interest. Only then will they click through for more details.

Here's one additional point that many may not notice, but it irked me:

Many of your lovely photos seem to be taken by a strong left handed person, and the resultant slope hurt my eyes.... there are actually about half a dozen such images, and this is one example. Its very subtle, so I've shown the before and after. I used the Picassa Straighten tool which is amazingly easy.

NC,
I see the planning, but for the contact page I get an inscrivez vous page, presumably from Homelidays, which put me off.
Another thing to add - "avec cheminée" for your salle à manger, very important too. I think it should be "le gite dispose" rather than "le gite disposant"

NC, you have me inspired, I am going to set to and get this done with one of my spare domain names that is hanging about doing nothing

la vache! wrote:I think it should be "le gite dispose" rather than "le gite disposant"

Or perhaps “Le gite comporte …..” or “Le gite inclut…..” ? There are so many alternatives.

Alan

Hi NC

I can't comment on the French (which I know is virtually the whole point of this thread) but just wanted to add my euros-worth that I think the site looks very charming and extremely attractive. Lovely shots and subtle colours.

Best of luck with it and let us know how much interest you get from it once it's up and running. I'm sure it has inspired many of us to pull our fingers out and work more on our own sites.

ATB
Beanie

There's a high chance I'm wrong with the following but I'll comment anway...

Can we say 'avec point de voisins'? I don't remember seeing 'point' used like that in anything I've read. I would have guessed 'avec peu de voisins'...

only one 'l' in tranquilité

and 'des vues surprenant' seems not quite right...perhaps 'impressionant'? 'or 'imprenable'?

Some minor corrections:

completement - accent on e
des vues surprenant - des vues surprenantes
la vie quotidien - la vie quotidienne
point de voisins - aucun voisin

Are you sure about sending them to Homelidays (with its 40,000 rentals) when they are on the point of enquiring?

Back to the va et vient bit, there is a lovely French expression "le train train quotidien" which has nothing to do with trains! It means the daily grind or the rat race. If you want to stick with your words, however, you will need to make the adjective quotidien agree with la vie (feminine), so la vie quotidienne.
Judith

PS Let me know if you want a German rendition sometime.