Please review my site.

[escape2charente]

Hello,

Please, if anyone would like to review my site and make comment.

http://www.escapetocharente.com

Thank you.

[Mountain Goat]

Welcome to LMH.

Interesting site, with a stack of information. Personally, hitting your home page, there is so much choice, I find it a bit difficult to know where to go next. My choice would be for a calmer home page, and a simple menu, but I could get used to your approach.

You just have to sort out when you use it's and when you use its - there are about a dozen mistakes without looking for them. In simple terms: it's is an abbreviation for it is - if that doesn't fit in with what you're trying to say, then change to its. Its is the possessive form.

Good luck, I'm sure it will be a success, especially when you've got a bit more feedback.

MG

[la vache!]

Your gites look lovely, but the website hurt my eyes too much and has given me a headache, so I'll have a detailed look later. At first glance it looks a bit cheap and tacky, which I'd have thought isn't the image you are looking for when advertising luxury gites. The bright green background, the different fonts and colours of fonts and so much text are really confusing too. The French page, apart from the French itself, was much nicer and calmer.

[TTP mk2]

Sorry but to me it looks a mess:

Just because SiteBuilder has facilities for various things doen't mean you have to use them.

Whole paragraphs underlined as links look wrong.

The Charent is a big (lovely) area & it's not easy to see exactly where you are.

IMHO the text would look better if there was a blank line between the paragraphs.

Do you really mean to advertise your competitors properties with your Google ads ?
Again IMHO, commercial sites that have Google ads look unprofessional insofar as they look as if the site owner is scratching for income.

[Windy]

Sorry - I couldn't get past page 1!

It's been said - too many different colours, fonts etc.

I'd so a search for gites in your area - look at the sites from gites which are successful (i.e. are getting booked up for next year) and see what they have in common.

Tone it all down a bit!

[Rocket Rab]

On the plus side, I like your use of a WiFi logo, that sure caught my eye

I found a neat one, available as far as I can see for legal download, here.

[escape2charente]

Thanks for all of your inputs, is this an improvement?

http://www.escapetocharente.com

I have just made a brief start on the homepage.

Comments please.

[la vache!]

You need to do something with the top bit, too much information, too many links to the rest of the site very offputting. And still very green, with multicoloured fonts and I don't like the bullet points on the homepage, or the AGF ad.

[escape2charente]

Yes i agree in some points but we all have a colour scheme, what do you mean AGF ad?

[Rocket Rab]

Hi, and welcome, E2C,

I think your site is good, in that it contains plenty of info, but I'm sure it would benefit from careful restructuring. By that I mean there is just too much to take in, so, instead of being informative, it becomes confusing. Perhaps, confronted with so much detail, your viewer may lack the courage to plough on? I'm easily dissuaded, of course, but there are probably lots more lazy folk like me around.

Consider spoonfeeding people: take all the hard work out of finding the info they need. For example, I like the slide show. There are some really nice photos in there, combined with snippets of info (in bullet form) which can be absorbed more easily. Maybe you need to slow the show down, a little? I found it went by too fast.

So, what I'm saying is: can you review your homepage and break it down into much smaller morsels? You may need to jig things round, build some other pages and transfer the "non-essential" (but nice to have) info elsewhere? Get all the house blurb across first, then lead people elsewhere. Good luck, I know it's ***** hard work setting up a website.

[la vache!]

The AGF banner ad on the bottom has now gone, as has the green background. It's better already on the homepage, although I think your photos should be more spread out and have the same kind of borders. And I'd rather see some text than all bullet points, you just get lost in them all.

[enid]

I am sorry to say I don't quite understand the offering - is this one gite or several? Every time I click on a different gite number I get the same pictures.

The site is very busy and so I'm afraid I haven't looked at all of it. I realise that you have a colour scheme but there are so many colours that it is counter productive.

The slideshow has some good photos but it went too fast for me.(I'm an old bird I'm afarid!)

RR has made some great suggestions about what you need to do. I know only too well how hard it is to set up a website - when you have to do redraft it's even harder but we've all been through it. I'm sure the effort will be worth while.

[enid]

I think the white background looks much better! I saw the AGF banner ad on the slideshow page - must be one of the google ads?

You could experiment with some gentler greens

[CSE]

Escape;

Are you Dutch speakers?

[Rocket Rab]

Wij spreken engels en frans een beetje

Doesn't look like it....