Getting close to "soft launch"

sdadesky · #1 (**permalink**) 11-15-2005, 05:32 PM

Hi all,

Well I've been reading this forum for months now, and watching the critiques
of different web sites with great interest.

Now it's time to submit mine:

http://www.hotel-hunter.com

Be gentle... (Just kidding. Fire away. I'm a big boy)

A few issues that are troubling me:

Keywords: Right now the fact that I cite a lot of hotel prices on first page makes
the term "USD" my main key word, instead of "hotel" or "hotels".

Should I replace the USD with an image, to decrease its "text weight", perhaps
even adding an alt tag "hotel currency for hotelX"

Loading time: Everyone likes fast pages and this one is not fast.
On a 56 K connection this one would take 53 seconds !! An eternity.

The reason is all the "search engine food" at the bottom. I wanted
dynamic results that change from week to week, so I cache the cold fusion
pages and renew them weekly. But it still takes very long to load, probably
due to the many images (star images, map icons) I have on the page.

Plus the lists serve a second purpose: many customers prefer to "browse
the merchandise" rather than targeting a specific hotel destination. I guess
with the attitude, "I wonder where the cheapest hotels in Europe are..."

Any ideas?

DocType : How important is this really?

When I add

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" >
or
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

to top of page IE responds by fixing the top header to the viewport instead of to the
document. Which is not functionality I want. So if you are looking at this with
IE I remove the Doctype statement.

There must be another way to deal with that but I have not found it yet.

Ok, now you can throw your tomotoes ...

Serge

Janet444 · #2 (**permalink**) 11-16-2005, 02:21 PM

Hi, I don't have too much to say, but there are so many well-known hotel search sites on the internet that you need to differentiate yourself.

Why should someone choose you over expedia or travelocity?

At the top of your site you say you are "the internet's BEST search engine" but you don't back it up. Can you have a slogan that's more specific?

To the left you talk about why to use your search engine and that's good. But I didn't notice it at first because it was to the left. To get more info, I need to hold my mouse over each item, and more info appears in a translucent yellow, and because it's translucent, home page text appears behind the text, which is hard to read.

You need to somehow find a way to differentiate yourself immediately, and to make it easier for readers to find out why to use your site, and quickly!

If you can find a clear, succinct way to offer a genuine benefit to your visitors, and make that a headline at the top of your home page, that will help.

Hope this is helpful.

Janet

sdadesky · #3 (**permalink**) 11-16-2005, 03:28 PM

Hi Janet,

Yes, I will have to back that slogan better. won't I.

I'll try to bring out more what distinguishes me from "the big boys" in my bullet points. It's very hard to sum that up in a five word slogan.

Back to the bullet point though. Would you want them to NOT be translucent?

What about loading time? Can you live with that?

Thanks
Serge