Jonathan Dewey — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 16:30:23 +0000

Hi Megan,

Many many thanks for such a thorough appraisal of the site and taking the time to do so - we really appreciate it! Increadibly helpful and insightful comments from you. Especially interesting ones about the size of text and amount of text - we concure wholeheartedly with you.

Once again, many thanks and if you have any more thoughts on the site/design/gui/navigation please feel free to write some more.

Jonathan

Megan — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 15:45:45 +0000

My first impresison is good. The site looks to be well designed and inviting. There is a lot to do here, lots of things to look at and links to click on. The green live help button is appearing underneath the section above it in Opera. That looks kind of out of place anyway but I can't see it all so I don't know for sure.

Upon further examination I am noticing a few problems. The intro text is very logwinded and boring. I stopped reading before the end of the first sentence. Boring and bulshitty. The text is also too small to read comfortably. I had to zoom in a lot. This is a great opportunity to invite people in and explain what they can do here. It's also a good opportunity to get in some good words for the search engines.

That brings me to the next problem: SEO. That text is also very far down the page in the source Code. A SE might not even get that far. Everything before that in the source order is navigation - think about whether you would want an SE to prioritize that. You could adjust the navigation terms to get in better search terms.

The header above the intro blurb is done as a graphic (that a SE couldn't read), and there are no defined headers on the page. The SE's know that a tag is important and prioritize those words appropriately. There are also no keywords in the title tag, and no meta description to show to users in the SERP's.'

I decided to pretend to be a customer and navigate around a bit. I tried the destination links. There is some information here about the destinations but I expected to see some holiday offers with the descriptions. Links to other sites with more information about the destination would be helpful too. All I got was a few pictures and another boring text blurb in a very small font. It didn't tell me about what I could do there or why I should go. The pictures aren't too small, but I still would have liked to enlarge them to see more detail. I see now that there is a link on the left to hotels - I ignored that at first. With all the inviting offers on the home page I expected to see the same on the destination pages.

So, the design doesn't look too bad (I like the colour scheme and liberal use of photos), but I'm finding that it isn't working very well at all. Usability and SEO need improvement.