Holiday Home Rental Site

[thepeacock]

Aimed at UK individuals with a holiday home property as well as Ex Pats with the site I am trying to build up a useful resource for anyone that wants to rent out their property for holiday lettings.

Here is Holiday Lettings Owners Advice

I've been active with the site for about six months but recently migrated it from blogger to wordpress and hosting is in the UK.

I took a free theme and did a few modifications.

What I would appreciate from this post is :

If you can spot anything broken, annoying or incorrect on site !

+ Am I committing any SEO suicides ? - I want to focus on content and hope that will mean ranking sorts it self out but if I'm doing anything stupid please let me know.

Also wondering what the next step should be... Anyone got any thoughts on building a community whether I should be going Twitter / forum / ???

Thanks in advance, I will be back to read & reply to your comments !

[NikkiPilkington]

You say you're not really bothered about SEO, but do you have the All In One SEO plugin installed? It allows you to give better titles to your pages.

Thismay help too: Internet Marketing Article - 20 steps to website heaven

Design wise it's very busy but I like it.

[thepeacock]

Thanks for looking at the site Nikki, appreciate it.
Thanks too for the article, a good read.

I have all in one SEO and google sitemaps installed plus of course SEO friendly permalinks.

[NikkiPilkington]

OK, then looking at the site, yu're not using the All in One SEO plugin on the pages of the site, or you've not thought about page titles?

This mighthelp (it's free) http://www.nikkipilkington.com/googl...te-heaven-free

[thepeacock]

Thanks Nikki, yes probably need to look at each post again - this is because I imported from blogger so need to go through and use the All in One SEO fields for each post / page

[bluestagstudio]

Hi there,

I've had a quick look at your website for you and have a few comments.

1. Double Navigation
You have a main menu right at the top of the page, then a gap, logo and then another main menu.

The general convention is to have 1 main menu, and then a sub menu elsewhere. Your site is a little confusing in the way that it appears to have two main menus.

I'd advise that you combine these two menus into one.

2. Use of colour
The top main menu has a white background colour against a background with white in it. This makes the link a little hard to read and impossible for those with eyesight problems.

3. Search Feature
Having a search feature on an information resouce like this is essential so glad it's there. But there's no actual submit button. You have to press enter which not everyone will be used to. Some people will look for the button and not know what to do when they can't find it!

4. Content Seperation
There is a lot of content on your homepage, which is great! But it needs to be segmented a little better, it's really hard to focus on one article at a time without being distracted by other content elsewhere.

Try experimenting with some dividers, differerent use of colours and more spacing in between content and articles.

There's a few things to start with, most of them are just minor but I think with a little tweaking this could be a nice site.

In regards to where you go next, a facebook group for holiday home owners might be a good start where people can share ideas on how to advertise their home etc.

And also a forum on your website would be nice as that will keep people coming back for more and playing a part in your community.

Also, what about getting people to write articles for you? In return for a bit of exposure on your website?

Hope all that helps!
Cheers,
Matt.

[david64]

These sites are very hard to get off the ground. Could very well take years, but if you can get it off the ground you should be able to make a living from it. I think you are taking the right approach to not really care about SEO. Although it is a still good to get the basics right. Other than that you will just need to get people interested in the site.

A good example of a similar successful site is:

Rental Property Knowledge - LandlordZONE

[thepeacock]

Thanks very much for looking & the great advice.

This is a great forum.

[UK Business Network]

Originally Posted by bluestagstudio

Hi there,

I've had a quick look at your website for you and have a few comments.

1. Double Navigation
You have a main menu right at the top of the page, then a gap, logo and then another main menu.

The general convention is to have 1 main menu, and then a sub menu elsewhere. Your site is a little confusing in the way that it appears to have two main menus.

I'd advise that you combine these two menus into one.

2. Use of colour
The top main menu has a white background colour against a background with white in it. This makes the link a little hard to read and impossible for those with eyesight problems.

3. Search Feature
Having a search feature on an information resouce like this is essential so glad it's there. But there's no actual submit button. You have to press enter which not everyone will be used to. Some people will look for the button and not know what to do when they can't find it!

4. Content Seperation
There is a lot of content on your homepage, which is great! But it needs to be segmented a little better, it's really hard to focus on one article at a time without being distracted by other content elsewhere.

Try experimenting with some dividers, differerent use of colours and more spacing in between content and articles.

There's a few things to start with, most of them are just minor but I think with a little tweaking this could be a nice site.

In regards to where you go next, a facebook group for holiday home owners might be a good start where people can share ideas on how to advertise their home etc.

And also a forum on your website would be nice as that will keep people coming back for more and playing a part in your community.

Also, what about getting people to write articles for you? In return for a bit of exposure on your website?

Hope all that helps!
Cheers,
Matt.

100% right on all points Matt, but i ran a forum site and found it extremely high maintenance, silly amount of clicks/hits but spammers were everywhere, very high maintainance, policing it was very hard and did not have enough time to police it as i should, due to work etc, so re-directed it in the end.

just a thought

[Trades 4 Work]

i think it needs brightening up a touch here and there, maybe give it a white background abd get rid of the dark grey, but thats just my opinion

[bluestagstudio]

Fair point with the forums, it can be a pain moderating them, maybe you could strike a deal with UKBL and get Emma to do it!!!