Hi all,

I'd appreciate some wisdom on a recently released site. It's very clean and easy to use and seems SEO'd to the hilt but I'd like some external criticisms/help if possible.

It's here: http://www.villasdirectcorsica.co.uk

Many thanks in advance

Matt

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Senegal Holidays :: Holidays to Gambia :: Corsica Holidays :: Holidays to Cape Verde :: Sardinia Holidays

so far pretty good, from my quick take its very clean and professional looking - good job but look out for the Critiques - their gona get-cha i know - they see things we don't see! : )

"Fomer occupiers have left their"

You need to spell check every page.

FYI - Google has not indexed this page: http://www.villasdirectcorsica.co.uk...ry_of_Corsica/

I would not change anything vis à vis the layout.

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Dave Barnes
+1.303.744.9024
http://www.marketingtactics.com
sitting in my basement with my iMac

The only major thing I see that hasn't already been said is that the colors are very blah to me...not exciting and travel oriented in my opinion at all.

That top photo is very dark for a beach villa scene, a lot of black and dark shades in it, it needs some more color as does the full site.

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We offer a total eCommerce solution with eCommerce Web Design using Pinnacle Cart

i'd have to agree with weslinda - i did a spanish villa website and used a similar muted colour scheme - having got similar feed back to yourself i changed it to bold reds and oranges which everyone agreed was much more appropriate to the website itself.

maybe it doesn't have to be a complete colour change but you could bring in a 'highlight' colour just to use, for example, on links, or bullets etc just to lift the mood of the site a bit. perhaps a dark pink would work well (pink/green theme is quite tropical)or a 'mediterranean' / rich turqouise blue

this website has great inspiration for colour schemes:
http://www.colorschemer.com/

Thanks for the replies guys - I'm guessing I'll get frowns and shrugs from the design guys on this but I'll certainly mention the colour scheme.

Now then, with a PR of 0 and roughly 14 uvs a day I guess I need to go get some links...

cheers

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Senegal Holidays :: Holidays to Gambia :: Corsica Holidays :: Holidays to Cape Verde :: Sardinia Holidays

Well don't be too mean on those design guys, they did a very nice job from a layout structure. The key is that the site simply needs more color.

Do that by improving the picture at the top, and changing some of the basic colors. Perhaps even using different pics on different pages.

There are some validation errors, and some things that would affect accessibility of the site, but all in all they created a visually well layed out site, just needs something to make it pop.

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We offer a total eCommerce solution with eCommerce Web Design using Pinnacle Cart

Very NEAT CLEAN layout and design...

I have one main suggestion.
You have the same banner heading on top of each page. This is not a problem in and of itself, however, you should change the picture either on a random basis (contact me if you want a script for it) or use several flash animations with property pics and people .etc...

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www.corporateface.com
Custom Website Design
No Templates

I agree, your design is good.
I like it 'cause it's so simple and neat.
Keep it up!

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Marketing Ideas and Insights

I think the site looks great. I find nothing wrong with the color scheme which I find very profession.

I like the flyout menu structures. And the information like "Know Before You Go", "What to Expect", "Activities" and "Region Guides" are all very good (but could benefit from more details in a few cases). I particularly like the history information under the "Region Guides".

Your "Why Book With Us?" and "Book With Confidence" sidebars are good.

I like the way information is organized consistently on individual villa pages (like numbers of bedrooms and baths; distances to restaurants, beach or airport, etc.). The textual description on each property is skimpy; I'd like to see more.

I like the way the photos scroll in place minimizing the amount of screen real estate utilized for photos. I don't like the size of the photos (I wish they were larger) and I'd also like to see captions on each photo that tell me what room or villa feature I'm looking at). Some listings don't have enough photos.

I do like the way villas are organized by region.

With all of that said, I find the site almost dysfunctional as it's very hard to quickly finding a property I'd be interested in. I'd like to see a multi-input search function that allows me to input the villa criteria that were important to me such as region, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, number of guests accommodated, price range, and individual features that might be important (like pool, maid service, satellite television, location relative to beach, etc.).

I don't at all like the availability date range being a required field in the current search function (I might be doing accommodation research without yet knowing my travel dates).

When search results are returned, I'd further like to be able to sort results by more options than the current Region, Resort or Name (price range would be particularly useful).

I'm also bothered that there is no price information available on individual listing pages until I do I "Price & Availability Search".

You should also be aware that the "Price & Availability Search" doesn't work in Firefox (it hangs forever on the "Please wait while we search for your accommodation" screen). It works fine in for me in IE 7.

Hope this helps.

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Pat Riley

Now that the design chaps and chapesses have had their say, I'll put my penny piece in about build issues.

Good to see that you have used style sheet for build, however, there are 26 markup errors on the home page alone.
see:
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbos...rsica.co.uk%2F

It will also help if all the style information is off page. eg <div style="position:absolute;top:0px;left:0px;visibili ty:hidden;">
No reason for that to be on the page when you have a style sheet already. If you really must have something on the page it should be in the header.

I guess you are using a CMS. If so - don't be tempted to use their online styling - that is the mess you get!!

Also, you could reduce the size of the page considerably by having all the JavaScript off page too. Might be better to use a good CSS menu - JavaScript menus can be replicated in CSS and are much more search engine friendly.
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/drop_examples.html has the best selection around.

I note too that your fonts are hard coded - gives folks in IE6 a problem if they need to zoom best to use ems or % where you can. If you do, remember to set the font size in the body at 100% (16px).

You mentioned the p/r of 0. if the site is just recently uploaded and a new domain, then just keep adding content and building links, if an older domain then ouch, there is much to do.

Best

Ian

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SEO Specialist, CSS Developers

Sorry, but boring. I would really make the front page a total graphical sales pitch. If you can sell me that the place is cool, then I will invistigate in more depth. But you don't grab me so if I was a visitor I would move on.

Nick