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Hotels in Bath Site Review Please

Discussion in 'Website Reviews' started by accelerator, Jul 13, 2009.

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  1. accelerator United Kingdom

    accelerator Well-Known Member

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    Hi All

    I would like your views on my new hotelsinbath.org.uk website.

    In particular, I would like your views on whether you think the links through to hotel providers are obvious enough.

    Look and feel wise, would you trust this website? Would you be happy to click the links on it? Would you stay and read rather than hit the back button?

    I put the site live on Sunday night, put a blog post about it up, and it's now indexed in Google.co.uk, on page 7 for "hotels in bath", which I was pretty pleased about.

    Rgds
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 11, 2015
  2. Domain Forum

    Acorn Domains Elite Member

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    IWA Meetup
     
  3. fish United Kingdom

    fish Well-Known Member

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    Having lived there for 17 years I'd capitalise on showing off the cities beauty i.e. get a few pics up

    Also your feedburner widget looks out of place on a site like this (plus it's something else for a visitor to click on rather than hotel bookings)

    Else it looks fine

    Cheers

    Fish
     
  4. accelerator United Kingdom

    accelerator Well-Known Member

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    Thanks, some good comments there and I agree with you, I need to get some pics added, and yes, I need to think whether the Feedburner widget is appropriate. I might swap it for a straight text link to the blog in the main menu.

    Thanks
     
  5. davedevelopment

    davedevelopment Well-Known Member

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    Can I ask why the adsense unit is right down at the bottom? I can't imagine it's going to attract much attention down there, so why bother having it?

    Otherwise looks nice and simple, gets to the point quickly enough.

    I recently registered Hotels in Amsterdam, not sure whether to take a similar approach or to download a datafeed of hotels and bang them all on.
     
  6. accelerator United Kingdom

    accelerator Well-Known Member

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    Yes, the AdSense is down the bottom because in this case I'd rather route as much through the aff programmes as possible, so it's just there in case someone scrolls down. The site is still in early days, I'll probably add some aff banners down the bottom too.

    Your domain is a good one, and I would develop it if I were you. I focus on SEO for my sites, and I need to write some more pages for this site and get some links in. I would say focus on traffic and search position before focusing on programming, although feeds is something I'd like to look at more closely when I get time. That said, I think things like the LateRooms.com search box which I have on are great tools and they are just a copy and paste out of the buy.at interface.

    Rgds
     
  7. davedevelopment

    davedevelopment Well-Known Member

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    Sound advice, my only problem is I'm good at the programming and find it less tedious and a lot easier than the SEO, so I always head down that route first and end up with a decent site that nobody knows about :(
     
  8. accelerator United Kingdom

    accelerator Well-Known Member

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    You could always outsource the content writing. I expect there are a lot of students / graduates that are skilled at writing that would welcome the extra work at the moment.

    Rgds
     
  9. feKIX United Kingdom

    feKIX Active Member

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    Regarding the adsense down the bottom (ooer missus!),

    If someone takes the time to read the whole page, once they are down there all they have to click on is the adsense.

    Im assuming this isnt a real top earner (I dont mean the site, but the click through rate - no offence is meant here, and Im no expert either!!).

    Again, assuming your links to the Hilton and hotels.com etc is earning you an affiliate commission I would place those links there at the bottom as well as at the top and do away with the adsense.

    Not sure if I made any sense there!! :rolleyes:

    Otherwise, I really liked it and would like you to do some for me!! It was bland enough (no offence again!) to generate clicks as you felt you wanted more info..

    I've really had to think about posting this post as I honestly do not mean to offend but sometimes Im not great at explaining things! I hope it makes sense, cos I've just read through it and now Im not so sure..lol!!

    Right...Im off to go into hiding now!
     
  10. retired_member16

    retired_member16 Banned

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    Im afraid I dont like it.

    If all you are interested in is Adsense conversion and/or late room affiliate payments then the site is too plain, far too much white space and in answer to your question, no I wouldn't trust it.

    You could have created something really eye-catching and with the same details and data, in Joomla in perhaps 10 minutes. I would prehaps look down that route?
     
  11. pugyrob United Kingdom

    pugyrob Well-Known Member

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    Sorry have to agree with firestars.

    Needs pictures and more work to get the trust factor, at the moment its clearly an affiliate link site and doest encourage me to browse it or trust it.

    I would make the top header a background/watermark of decent image of bath town. Look to add a few pages to it and make it offer real value to someone searching it. A lot of work required IMO and hard to knock this sort of thing out overnight.

    Dont like being critical but its better to get honest appraisals.
     
  12. accelerator United Kingdom

    accelerator Well-Known Member

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    Thanks for the comments. I am going to add some pictures to the site. My main interest is that someone feels it is okay to click on one of the links, if it's still too basic for people to trust it enough, that would be a problem, so I'll add some pictures and more info and see how it goes.

    Rgds
     
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