Website for Review
http://www.budgetrooms.co.uk

Additional Comments
Hi,

I launched this site in August last year on the back of another site.  So it's basically a copy.  I have had a good look around at the other sites requesting reviews and have been very impressed by what I have seen.  I am particularly impressed by the number of doityourself sites.  I would like to make further amendments myself and have been reading  my Creating Web Pages for DUMMIES.  I am upto page 111 and still clueless  I have not taken the opportunity to develop this site and would appreciate any feedback.

Thanks

Pete

A very professional-looking site and certainly confidence-building for your customer. I checked under apple Mac OS 10.4- it loaded great under Firefox but not al all under Safari. Considering Safari is becoming more popular (with iPhone and iPod), you might like to consider this.

It was easy to navigate and everything was clearly presented. being Irish I have an Irish question - in your "Ireland" listing Belfast gets its own page, even though no other city is mentioned and Belfast's county, Co. Down, is already listed. Any reason?

Finally, my only suggestion, based at users who don't know their UK geography, is to incorporate a geographical map somewhere with links to each county. Some people like to holiday with a location in mind.

Good luck,

pjd.

pjdscott wrote:

A very professional-looking site and certainly confidence-building for your customer. I checked under apple Mac OS 10.4- it loaded great under Firefox but not al all under Safari. Considering Safari is becoming more popular (with iPhone and iPod), you might like to consider this.

It was easy to navigate and everything was clearly presented. being Irish I have an Irish question - in your "Ireland" listing Belfast gets its own page, even though no other city is mentioned and Belfast's county, Co. Down, is already listed. Any reason?

Finally, my only suggestion, based at users who don't know their UK geography, is to incorporate a geographical map somewhere with links to each county. Some people like to holiday with a location in mind.

Good luck,

pjd.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

Looks like a mistake with Belfast which I will get on with to sort.  I agree with you re: the maps and aim to address over the next month.

Thanks again and much appreciated.

perfect101

I loved it and found it easy to use  i have put you a link up for it on my site in case anyone fancys a short break.
The only thing i didnt like was the colour scheme yellow and orange  but i find thats a personal choice and i am sure you like it.

Nice design and layout.  On the technical side, you have some errors in the code.  I'm not going to break them all down, since they don't appear to affect the way your pages display, but will highlight some general rules.

Since you've designed your page as xhtml, there are a couple of things to consider.  First, all tags and attributes should be in lower-case (i.e. <meta name="..." instead of <META NAME="...").  Second, when a tag doesn't have an end tag (<meta ...>,<img ...>,<input ...>, etc.) the tag should end with " />" (space, slash, closing angle. example: <meta ... />, <img ... />, <input ... />).  You've done this in some parts, but other parts look like they were imported and not fixed.

Other things to watch for: the ampersand (&) character is a special character used to build special character entities (non-breaking spaces, various symbols, etc.) because of this, the ampersand used in text could confuse the parser (usually doesn't, but it's a good practice to fix it anyway).  To fix this, you would use the character entity for the ampersand which is &amp; (including the semicolon).  I'd also take advantage of the alt attribute in img tags.  This gives the user information on what the picture is when they don't get or can't see the image.  It also gives the serch engines more text to evaluate when placing your page in the SERPs.  You don't however need the name attribute in img tags, so if you don't have anything to put in the name attribute (name="") then just drop it.

If you do want to find and examine all the errors in your pages, you can use the "HTML Validator" plug-in for Firefox, or run it through the world wide web consortium's validator here: http://validator.w3.org/.  Note that an error-free page isn't necessary, I just think it shows a concern for quality to those that look at that sort of thing (though others here think it just shows a higher level of obsessiveness  )

wyldeflower wrote:

I loved it and found it easy to use  i have put you a link up for it on my site in case anyone fancys a short break.
The only thing i didnt like was the colour scheme yellow and orange  but i find thats a personal choice and i am sure you like it.

Thanks for the support and feedback

budgetrooms

sourcez wrote:

Very nice! Looks very professional and loads fast.

I have been to sites nowhere near as nice as this looking for places to stay; as a consumer your site is great. not much else to say!

I don't know why but your domain choice reminds me of lastminute.com - and other sites like that. Can't quite place why but the site itself also has the same feel! (That's a good sign) Very professional.

Couple of things, the map idea from above would be great, maybe a contact form on the contact us page? You'll have to weigh up the pros and cons of this though - I personally prefer forms to loading up my email BUT you get people who enter their email incorrectly etc. Up to you.

Only other thing is RE your flash banner - you've got budgetrooms.co.uk in plain text rather than your logo - might as well add the logo in?

The description box at the bottom of the hotel pages also seems a little odd. Doesn't really seem to be in the right place - or maybe it's not really needed at all? Once again - you decide!

Good luck with the site, may well pay you a visit myself!

Really appreciate the feedback.  I have afew changes to make over the next few months and will certainly incorporate your comments.

Thanks again

budgetrooms

Steven_A_S wrote:

Nice design and layout.  On the technical side, you have some errors in the code.  I'm not going to break them all down, since they don't appear to affect the way your pages display, but will highlight some general rules.

Since you've designed your page as xhtml, there are a couple of things to consider.  First, all tags and attributes should be in lower-case (i.e. <meta name="..." instead of <META NAME="...").  Second, when a tag doesn't have an end tag (<meta ...>,<img ...>,<input ...>, etc.) the tag should end with " />" (space, slash, closing angle. example: <meta ... />, <img ... />, <input ... />).  You've done this in some parts, but other parts look like they were imported and not fixed.

Other things to watch for: the ampersand (&) character is a special character used to build special character entities (non-breaking spaces, various symbols, etc.) because of this, the ampersand used in text could confuse the parser (usually doesn't, but it's a good practice to fix it anyway).  To fix this, you would use the character entity for the ampersand which is &amp; (including the semicolon).  I'd also take advantage of the alt attribute in img tags.  This gives the user information on what the picture is when they don't get or can't see the image.  It also gives the serch engines more text to evaluate when placing your page in the SERPs.  You don't however need the name attribute in img tags, so if you don't have anything to put in the name attribute (name="") then just drop it.

If you do want to find and examine all the errors in your pages, you can use the "HTML Validator" plug-in for Firefox, or run it through the world wide web consortium's validator here: http://validator.w3.org/.  Note that an error-free page isn't necessary, I just think it shows a concern for quality to those that look at that sort of thing (though others here think it just shows a higher level of obsessiveness  )

Really helpful.  Thank you very much and will get on the case next week.

thanks again

budgetrooms