Web site design - advice please

We're helping in the redesign of a web site:

www.riverchalet.com

and we'd like some feedback from you people because you could one day be looking for a great vacation spot and might check out this web site if you're looking for a great get-away from it all vacation.

The pages with plain backgrounds are the old design and the colourful pages with image backgrounds are the new design. Which looks better to the viewer? What else is good? What would be better? Do the pages load quickly? Easy to read? Other comments?

We've looked at some web site design tips sites and have some mixed feelings about what is good and what works. We need fedback from you now.

By all means, if you like the holiday idea presented, contact the office and book your reservation. I don't know about the office staff, but the on site staff are LGBT friendly.

We're looking forward to your comments. Thanks for your help.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chimera

Learn to fucking program. Bitch.

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Well, that was damn nasty and totally uncalled for. And, to think we actually believed people are nice, kind and friendly in here.

How disappointing!!!!

My comments:

navigation links between the pages should be at the top or on the left not at the bottom.
There should be navigation links on the home page.
The layout of pages for each property should be the same
The text styles colour etc should be consistent accross the whole site

Good luck, they look like lovely properties!

Robbie

Thanks for the tips. Yes, those we are working on. Any slow loading pics? The owner says yes, but we are on dial up and only one is slow that we have found.

We've been reading a web site design tips site which has been helpful.

Hopefully no one else is as rude as Chimera.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by shybipinay

Well, that was damn nasty and totally uncalled for. And, to think we actually believed people are nice, kind and friendly in here.

How disappointing!!!!

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What did you expect from someone using the s/n of "Chimera"?
CHIMERA:
1. Greek Mythology. A fire-breathing she-monster usually represented as a composite of a lion, goat, and serpent.
2. An imaginary monster made up of grotesquely disparate parts.


Hey Azrael,
It is a nice looking site. Not too cluttered, but not so simplistic as to look crappy.

Needs more pictures, though. Maybe some interior shots of the cabins with some floor plans (if you have access to them), a map of the area and an areal photo or two, like some of the higher end hotels use on their sites.

No, we certainly didn't expect that. Thanks for the defintion.

Thanks also for your comments on the site. It is a work in progress and we are working on the pics. There are pics for the guesthouse and pics for the chalet have been done and are in the process of being transferred to the site.

We are getting strong opposition from head office - in particular, a marketing specialist. Our feeling is she should stick to marketing. I'm sure if she was staring html code in the face, she'd be lost. We've just received 2 emails from the company owner who passed on this person's comments and while not as blunt as Chimera, they were rude and condescending to say the least.

We're trying to reflect the outdoors and wilderness. Personally, I find plain coloured background web sites boring and routine. We wanted this one to stand out somewhat while still possessing the flavour of the great out doors.

Folks, if you're looking at the site and you like it, please phone the 1-800 number (free call) and tell the office so. Ask for Roland. While you're at it, book a vacation at one of the cabins.

As it is a work in progress, expect more changes as the weeks go by. Thanks again for the input.

I would suggest getting rid of the animated gifs. That generally isn't thought of as "professional". The Birdhouse and Butterfly cartoon bars on the "Gateway Guest House" page are really regarded the same way. Also, I noticed there is contact info at the top AND the bottom of the landing page. I feel that's a bit redundant.

If you can, make the photos larger all over. Since it's a vacation site, those shots should be the main focus of each page. They're getting lost in the patterned backgrounds. I would also suggest changing to solid backgrounds on each page. The patterns are distracting and draw they eye away from the main focal points..

The top photo on the Gateway House page loaded a bit slowly and I run on a cable modem.

I also noticed a little repetition in the use of some of the river photos. Try using a bit more variety in the images from page to page.

Hope this helps.

Awesome, herbwoman39. Thanks so much. We will be reducing the animated gif's. A professional web site designer and related web design tips site said contact info and links is supposed to be top and bottom. No one like scrolling to find it, etc. Granted, it's redundant, but it saves the viewer time in site usage. Yes, photos will be larger. The gateway photo does load slow and we are working on that. Solid backgrounds are the norm and that's why we strayed. Too much normal is boring. We are sticking to soft bkgrnds and outdoor related themes in keeping with the wilderness experience. Yes, we noticed some duplication of info especially with the chalet page - there are 2 of them.

Thanks again. This is wonderful.

If you need any server active scripting let me know. You know what you want better than anyone else appearance wise rather, concentrate on making it easy to navigate around your pages coupled with good creative writing and an efficient syntax. Among the most important elements of your site are the search engine terms (meta tags).........

The easier it is to find and navigate and the more focused you are to your particular goals and services the better kind of clients will be attracted to your site which will greatly nurture your business.

Namaste,

Ed

Thanks Mr_one_drful. Meta tags was something we worked on with immediate noticable results.

One point we are trying to make is that this is not a corporate type destination. It is a wilderness destination. In other words, if you wore your suit here, you'd be laughed at by the locals. This is jeans and cowboy hat country. The web site should reflect that and not have a corporate run of the mill look to it.

There will be some more changes by the morning. Thanks again for your support.

If this were 1997, that would be a pretty snazzy website. These days... well, it's clear you're not a pro. Sorry. :( I don't want to sound like a jerk, but if you're trying to run a business, you need honest feedback, not sugar coating. Really, your best bet probably is to find a graphic/web designer who'll work for cheap and do a professional job. You might have good luck if you can find a local college that has a web design program, they often need projects for students. Back when I was teaching professional web development, this was the kind of site we LOVED to have come in, because there's a lot of room for students to have fun and do something really visually interesting, without being so complicated that they'd get overwhelmed.

The main problem with the site is that you're not a pro, and it shows. Now, before I'm labeled a total jackass, ask yourself a simple question: Do you know what you're doing with web design? No. You admitted it in your original question. And that's OK. You should have seen some of my first web sites... oy vey. ;) And when I was teaching this stuff, I'd give my students a few weeks to just go ahead and build whatever they liked before starting to grade them on style, because experimenting is the only way to really learn this stuff. Some of the monstrosities they created along the way would make your eyes bleed -- and in all seriousness, quite a number of my students' early web pages would quite literally give me headaches to look at.

Contrary to popular opinion, good web design is really freaking hard. You're not going to get it right on your first try, so really, don't worry about it, and trust me, don't feel bad about it. By the standards of amateur web pages, this one's not bad. But it's still very much an amateur web page.

Now, realistically, most businesses out there still only have amateur web sites. So you don't have to go out and pay thousands of dollars to rebuild your site. (Actually, you could probably get a decent pro to knock you off a site for well under a grand. It's quite seriously about a morning's worth of work to bash that into a reasonably simple but visually appealing template. But then again, it's been years since I did this work professionally, rates may have changed.) You can certainly make do with what you have, just keep tinkering with it over time, and you'll certainly get a lot better. If you do decide to go that route, there are a couple things you need to change right now.

Animated gifs have got to go. Professional web designers stopped using them years ago. (This goes double for background images.)

Background images are rarely a good idea. They're visually distracting and they make text harder to read. Particularly talented graphic designers can sometimes use them to great effect, but neither of us is that good. So don't do it.

The background colour should be the same on every page, as should the text colour.

Images should ALWAYS be shrunk to their on-screen size in a separate program and NEVER resized using the width and height attributes in HTML. If you want a small version and a large version, save the large version first and then shrink it down and save the small version. Web browsers suck at resizing images, and having the oversized images also dramatically slows down page loading.

If for some bizarre reason you're forced to resize images in HTML, NEVER EVER EVER make them bigger. EVER. STOP DOING IT. Taking a small picture and stretching it to look bigger just means you've got a large distorted image. Yes, I'm being strident. Trust me -- this is one of the worst web design sins, right after blinking text and animated background gifs.

Your JPGs that are the right size are horribly over-compressed. You're trying to show off the cabin, so make sure you save the JPG at high or maximum quality. If you're using Photoshop, they should be saved with at least 10 out of 12 on the quality scale. Trying to shrink the file size by picking lower image quality just means you have crappy distorted images.

The pictures of the room are a little too small, making it hard to see what the place really looks like. Of course, this is made worse by the ugly over-compression. Try 500px wide or so, see how that looks. You might even want to step it up a bit wider. Of course, you'll want to start by grabbing the full-resolution original image and shrinking a copy of that down, rather than trying to stretch the existing small images... but you already knew that, right? ;)

Your navigation should generally be at the top of each page. Most web surfers navigate by just clicking links and scanning through pages quickly to try to find the information they're looking for. With no navigation at the top, that's a lot harder, and people will be a lot more frustrated.

Your navigation needs to be consistent. Your site isn't big enough to justify a real menu, so every single link should be available on every single page.

The colours, fonts, headers, and footers should be consistent on every single page. Only the body of the page should change. You've got one site, it should look like one site. If you don't have access to a professional tool like Dreamweaver, you'll have to do this by cut-and-paste.

Wordpress and CSS are your best friends (PHP and SQL by association)

www.tupoe.org
Done completely in Wordpress and PHPBB.

CSS isn't that difficult to learn and Wordpress makes site managment a snap.

I thought the photos might be a bit clearer too. Theyre a bit faded. I agree about losing the animated gifs and birdhouses butterflies etc.

Now check out the web site. It still needs some tweaking, but the Marketing Director and owner have approved it, so we're quite happy. Thanks all for your input and support.

http://www.riverchalet.com

One thing that I found confusing was when you click on a link the order of the links change, makes it hard to know where you are. The site would look better if you use 2 or 3 columns rather than stretching all the info across the page. Not crazy about the background look, all the pages should be consistent with each other.

While I was navigating through the site I forgot what the web site was about. It looks like a web site with pictures and text. I had to go back to the home page to see what kind of site it was.

Check the file size of your photos if the size is to big the images will take longer to download. Make sure your images are optomized.

Not trying to sound harsh I studied web design in school and my first web site that I created look similar to yours which after learning more about web design I learned what to look for in a web site.

I'm not a professional but I have done a few sites.

Site looks good can tell you are still working on it. I can help with it if you would like give you some tips and Ideas please contact me in private if you so desire.

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