A Hotel to Come Home to

A bit more Color added and a Language Question

Nostalgia screen shot of our static site HaagscheSuites.nl

After the unpleasantness of the hack and other duties, I just had some time to consider the color scheme of the new site. This is very easy to do and very easy to change with the Thesis theme I’m using.

I’ve made a screen shot of the soon to be old site that served us so well for over 8 years. I was so proud of it, because:

Much thought had gone into:

  1. Very fast loading, essential when many people were still on very slow internet connections, but even essential now with high sped internet access of nowadays: People tend to get less patient.
  2. Showing as many photos as possible without slowing down the loading speed of the page. We preloaded them..nifty.
  3. Address and telephone numbers of Haagsche Suites on every page for easy reference for our guests.
  4. Even the e-mail address was always shown, despite everybody warning against it. Mail spam had to be handled with spam filters in our mailbox.
  5. When applied, I thought the drop-down menus were a killer application. They enabled us to keep all the links within the one-page-without-scrolling principle we tried to maintain. The only disadvantage of a drop-down menu is that not every user appreciates it. I’ll have to think about that as well here.
  6. The color scheme worked fine. Easy to read and just a bit different of the rest of the hotel sites. Before going wild on colors I will just bring the colors her close to the old scheme.
  7. One of the big brain breakers is how to have your site in two languages. We used to have an English language landing page and each page linked to the Dutch equivalent and vise versa.

Bear with me:-)
What is wise for the new site: To concentrate all languages at one url here (the .com one) or to put the English language part at the url here with the .com extension and the Dutch language part at the url with the .nl extension? Do you have any ideas?

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3 Comments

  1. Heyy Guido

    Josiah Mackenzie is a common friend of ours which is how I started following you.

    You really are doing wonderful work on the Internet, prolific blogger that you are.

    But I do have one suggestion – why not integrate ALL your blogging into one site ?

    For someone who is interested in you, I really don’t know where to start. Should I start with Happy Hotelier ? Or your guest blogs ? or Haagsche Suites.nl ? Or .com ? I am really confused.

    I think you should integrate all your blogging efforts into ONE site – preferably Haagsche Suites.com.

    Why ?

    Basically, as I understand it, your main aim is to sell your suites right ? Then, ALL your readers must be pushed towards your Hotel Site. And a .com extension is much easier to remember than a .nl one for both Google search and readers of your blog.

    I think you should copy all the information from .nl to .com and scrap the .nl site immediately. It is really confusing to get two results on Google search and then not know where to go…

    I used to have a static site at http://www.mitaroy.com and a blog at http://www.mitaroygoahotel.com until many people told me that it was really confusing for them to have to choose between 2 sites.

    So I scrapped my static site and integrated ALL my content into http://www.mitaroygoahotel.com.

    Why not do the same ?

    Just a thought!

    Cheers
    Mihir

    PS Take a look at my blog / website at http://www.mitaroygoahotel.com and tell me what you think…

  2. GJE

    Hi Mihir

    Thank you for your suggestion. I’ll think about it.

    I’ve had a look at your site already. Josiah is good in bringing together like minded people.

    One foremost suggestion I have for you is to get in contact with (yes it is a Dutch site) http://www.hoteliers.com and integrate their online booking engine (white label) into your site. It’s easy and like on this site it greatly eases the online booking possibilities for your guest. One of the problems of the old site is online booking is not very easy.

    My second advice is more photos.

    Cheers!

    Guido

  3. Thanks so much for your advice and guidance, Guido, much appreciated!

    More photos are definitely on the cards.

    I tried the hoteliers.com site but it is only for hotels in some parts of Europe. Not India. Am I correct ???

    I am very interested in your transition from static to wordpress. All the best !

    Cheers
    Mihir

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