Website Re-launch - Need opinions

cantona_deux

www.gapofdunloetours.com

re-launched this year and looking to do some good business. Have marketing plan together but not much budget to out towards it.

Any comments would be helpful.

Chet Zar

First impressions...where to start...cripes man what possessed you to choose such a horrific shade of blue?!??

You need an 'About' section under the 'Home' tab to tell me exactly what it is you are providing.

On the 'Book Now' page I don't know what I'm booking. When I enter dates no images show on the following page.

The little intro at the start with the car is completely unnecessary.

The 'Contact Us' link needs to be more prominent.

Has promise but needs more work - starting with that colour!!

Cianos

Intro is pointless and takes too long to load.

The video is bad quality and has no pause function - why not just use youtube?

The book Now pages are tragic..."Displaying available products"...what products?

And where you pick the date/time, it took me a bit to realise that the last two boxes were for the time of tour. At the very least put "Date" and "Time" above them.

Look at other tour operator websites and model your site off them because what you have there won't be up to scratch at all.

cantona_deux

Cheers changed the colours due to existing site was old fashioned.

The booking part was not part of the original spec and was added afterwards will try and make the changes.

Not really my forte but I will try.

Appreciate the comments.

ASportingChance

I agree to do away with the car intro. You should go straight into what you do and an about us section with a big link to book now
Best of luck with it

Axwell

Lose the intro its too long and adds nothing.

Video and sound quality is poor and the buttons dont say what they are.

The video shouldnt be the first page you land on, it should be a page you chose to look at from the navigation. The first page should be a homepage with some intro text and information about the site/business to help with SEO and give the user an idea what the site is about.

The urls arent search engine friendly and you still have the joomla fav icon in the address bar.

SEO or lack of is going to make this site struggle in Google unless you make changes. The ursl need to be search engine friendly and you need to look at changing the first page as i said above.

You have very little meta data in the code such as keywords and titles.

Put a log for facebook or make it more prominent, i had to scroll down to see the footer of the website and wouldnt really notice any of the text there so maybe change the colour and font or background colour.

You should have a contact us link on the navigation.

probe

If you like blue, I'd suggest a different shade (for BGCOLOR). I'd suggest one of the 000 blues in http://html-color-codes.com/. Or go for a white or dark grey to almost black. Or perhaps something like http://europe.wsj.com/home-page

While the pictures show picturesque locations, make them big and awesome and higher resolution and a little bit more saturated with higher contrast.

Pictures are worth a thousand words. Click on picture for larger image option should be available. You are basically selling the scenery. The picture is the closest you can get to demonstrating your product so they can kick the tyres before buying.

Look at the homepage pic in http://www.gstaad.ch

Another site that emphasizes pics: http://www.riffelalp.com (not suggesting you use music)

Bandwidth is cheap. Too many websites have small pics with no opportunity to see bigger images because the designers are living in the dark ages of dial-up.

Provide a choice of languages - EN FR DE IT ES - even if you just use google language tools to do the translation. Be sure to translate back to English using the same system to check for accuracy.

mattfinucane

Hi cantona_deux,

Take a look at http://www.abbeytavern.ie and http://www.australia.com and then take another look at yours. While not exactly falling into your category of tourism, these are sites you should aspire to nevertheless in terms of their build quality and content.

KJF

Hi cantona_deux,

Like most have said before me, at the very least try to scrap the intro video, it serves no purpose. People have such low attention spans these days a good portion of users are likely to exit the site before the animation finishes loading.

Homepage
If I were you I would seriously consider removing flash entirely from the site, I think it's doing more harm to your website than good.
The controls are confusing, the car seems to move by its own accord, the user doesn't feel in control. The content behind the animations will never be seen by 90% of the visitors as they'll lose patience with it very soon.

I've been to the Gap of Dunloe and it's a stunning part of Kerry with beautiful scenery. The first thing a user should see when landing on the homepage are images which convey this to the user. You need to draw your users in from the moment they land on the site with pictures of the scenery they'll soon have the chance to see. Not some map they can't yet relate to.

Book Now page
The date picker is all wrong. There are too many controls here. You should only need the text input field and not the button and select fields.
The images seem to be broken on the Tour select page and the price seems to be missing. All tour costs are €0 per person!
Validation seems to be very poorly implemented with required fields not highlighted.
The white background is a departure from the rest of the site pages which have a gold/brown background.

There are lots of other small issues which you can take care of over time but these will be the difference between people handing you over their credit card information or navigating to another website.

KJF
http://tinktank.ie

shaner

Hi Cantona_deux,

Not the worst site I've seen by a long shot. One thing I'd point out that made me dislike the site was the "Book Now" popup.

I think there are better ways to highlight that than a popup in Joomla.

Cheers,
Shane