Please Review Website 1

[jdhamot]

Hello Everyone,

I was hoping to get some input on a website that I developed for the new owners of an inn that I used to help manage. I was on an extremely short deadline and an even smaller budget so there are a lot of things that I did not get to do with the design and layout.

http://www.mountainaireinn.com

My main concern now is search engine recognition. I have read all the other threads about SEO and related facts so I'm not looking for that type of info. I am hoping for a "Website looks search engine friendly and you should register with them now" type of response. The domain had an old site for the inn on it that was extremely bad and some of the links from it are still showing up on a few of the search engines (specifically yahoo). Can I redirect those links to go to the home page? Example,

http://www.mountainaireinn.com/rates

no longer exists I would like that link to go to

http://www.mountainaireinn.com.

Also I know the pictures are taking some time to load and I am working on fixing that issue. I appreciate any and all input/suggestions!!!!

Thank you for your time,
Josh

 

[johnwm]

1. Make sure it validates - try

http://validator.w3.org

2. Take css out into a separate CSS file
3. Avoid mailto: unless you like loads of spam.
4. Images 1 @ 350K = nearly 3 minutes on dial-up!

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[richcleverley]

I suppose you could use custom 404 pages for the pages that no longer exist. Ones that say "this site has just been redesigned so this page no longer exists". You could then fit the style of the site around the 404 pages and offer a link to the homepage and also a timed redirect.

I presume this can be done on IIS (the webserver you are working on). I've only ever done it on Apache.

Richard

 

[ChrisHunt]

OK, well the answer to your question is "yes", it's ready for search engines. There's probably no need to register the site with them, if there was already a site on this URL they'll find the new pages then next time they pass through.

Sadly, it's less ready for humans. Top priority is thos pictures - never, never, never resize a picture by just setting the height and width in the <img> element. It means the browser has to download the full size image, then do a (usually lousy) resize job on it. You've got to resize those images to the size you need in a graphics progam, to get the file sizes more manageable.

While you're at it, you need to get some pictures of the inside of the cabins/rooms. At the moment, I can't tell much more from the site than I could from the street outside.

The typography is a bit odd, some bits in Times, others in Verdana. Headings are big, enormous in the case of the Links page, body text is tiny. As you've sized the body text in pixels, IE-users can't re-size it to something bigger. That may put off older visitors.

Under the hood it's hideous, looks to have the mark of FrumpPage upon it:

.style38 {
	font-size: 14px;
	color: #003399;
}
.style49 {
	font-size: 9px;
	font-family: Verdana;
}
.style52 {font-size: 12px; font-family: Verdana; }
.style53 {font-family: Verdana}
.style57 {
	font-family: Verdana;
	font-size: 10px;
	color: #0080C0;
}
... etc ...

Giving those classes more meaningful names and, frankly, rationalising them a bit might give your pages a more uniform appearance. The HTML's no better:

<td height="61" colspan="2" align="center" scope="row"><p align="center" class="style30"><span class="style53"><strong>We hope to see you the next time you take a short getaway or extended  trip to the High County!</strong><br>
              <br>
            </span><span class="style53">Deborah McDowell</span><br>

                <span class="style52">InnKeeper</span><span class="style30"><br>
                <br>
                </span></p>
            </td>

All those nested spans and what-not are so unnecessary when you could apply most of the CSS to the <td>. Obviously it would be better still if you didn't use tables for layout, but let's walk before we can run!

You can do much better on the Directions/Maps page - take a look at the Google Maps API at

http://www.google.com/apis/maps/

- it'll let you put a free scrollable zooming map right on your page, instead of a link to Mapquest. You can get better integrated weather forecasts too, try weather.com for example.

Content-wise, I'd look to get more information in there about Blowing Rock (for example, what's "historic" about it?) and othe local attractions. It'll be good food for SE spiders as well as being useful to visitors.

Hope that gives you some food for thought.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[jdhamot]

Thank you everyone for your quick responses!!!

--Chris
I appreciate all the great advice. As for the code, the site was done in Dreamweaver. I guess I could go back through and clean up some of the changes you mentioned, I need to brush up on my html first.... it's been a while.

The pictures are a huge problem and I know this. The big thing was that they asked me to have this up and running in a week and they had the pictures taken by the same people that did the brochure so they were the last things that I received. I guess I'll just use photoshop to clean those up. There will be virtual tours of the rooms and cabins, but the new owners don't have the remodeling finished. The directions page utilizes mapquest upon their request, and the weather page is a local site from this area so they wanted to use it for that reason.

How much time would I have to invest on dropping the tables for structure? I am assuming that would mean completely redeveloping the site? I will look into CSS structure on here and then may have a few more questions for you.

Again, thank you all for the help and if there are any other suggestions I'd appreciate it!!!

Josh