SITE REVIEW: www.sussexhotelguide.co.uk

Please take a look at my new site sussexhotelguide.co.uk.

It's basically a (hopefully) revenue earner through booking hotel rooms via an affiliate on a commission basis.

It's only been up for 2 days and have had 100's of hits. The site hasn't been properly indexed yet but Google ads have proved successful. The only problem is no-one has booked any rooms!

Any advice and/or criticism will be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks
Ben

LINK: http://www.sussexhotelguide.co.uk

First remember hits isn't a great indicator of traffic; if I go to a page with 20 images or other external files, that's 21 hits.

The site looks clean, and easy to use from a visual and navigation perspective.

As far as revenue, making money as a hotel affiliate is really pretty hard. I ran a site that was selling hotel packages that was doing about $400k (US) a year. The same group of folks, had an auxilary site that was doing about a quarter of that. When they got tired of managing it (they worked directly with the properties putting packages together), they decided to just do one of these affiliates with hotels.com. They revenue went down to next to nothing. They got maybe a few bookings a week. This was the same group of folks that were doing so well with the other site. But on the other site they were very active, putting together packages and information not available elsewhere.

The question you'd have to ask yourself, is if this wasn't your site, would you book on here? What does your site have to offer that one of the larger, known brands have? In terms of brand recognition, it's safer to go with someone that is tried and true. Would you buy something from an online vendor who's name you don't recognize, over a best buy for the same price? Also, when you click on more info, you actually get transferred over to activehotels.com.

I certainly don't want to discourage your venture. But if you go the hotels route, try to come up with an idea that will pull people to your site, and distinguish you from the other guys.

Cheers, and Good luck,
Chris

Hi Ben,

I like it very good clean and crisp.

I would personally like to see a weather map either live or integrated, lik eyou use for the Sussex map - that way i can see how the weather effects me as a vistor and my hotel, area etc.

Being a visual person I would like to see more "Interior Shots" of the hotel, rooms, bars, diners etc, just so i can see what is on the "Inside"

Also the Click to Book is good but i can see no indication of the Hotel i am booking for? I would assume it was from the link but a bit more info,picture would be useful

Overall a great site though well done!

Dr Snipe

Hi

Just Good

Professional looking site: neat and clean just like a good hotel room.

What kind of link do you accept to be listed in your site?

Thanks.

Thanks for all of your thoughts so far.

Good idea re: Weather map - im not sure how this would be done - integrating live weather onto a googlemap - im sure someone has come up with a mashup for this!

Will also look into adding a 'click for more images' link for each hotel to show more images.

Johnni "What kind of link do you accept to be listed in your site?" . Ideally a tourist/holiday site link. What type of link were you thinking of?

Cheers guys....
and more reviews would be great!


Ben

neap and clean, but I didn't like this orange, too much garish for me. Headline doesn't show your subject (irony that the same is on my webiste) , I think you should put some nice hotel pictures.

Sorry Saul, not sure wot you mean here - do you mean the page titles?


Thanks
Ben

No, page titles is entirely clear, but the title background isn't I think. In my opinion you should change this small image in right corner for something else, something what will describe your side clearly.

Sorry for english. Probably is difficult to understand my opinion.

First impression: Where are the buttons?
Honestly. The site looks too plain. I can appreciate you having taken the time to make some buttons with effects, but in this case they are inappropriate. At least the basic navigation has to be obvious to your visitors and if they like your site, they'll investigate further. Why don't you place at least the first set of links under the nav-bar?
Oh! I just noticed your links at the bottom of your page. VERY VERY bad move! You want to make money? Then let people see what you have to offer!
As for your Google ads.. The research shows they work best on the side where your visitors don't have to scroll down, or on top and under the header image.

It looks nice and clean, I like that. You get a little "chatty" with your content. The first box at top is almost entirely unnecessary. There is somethiing about the look that does _not_ look professional to me, but I can't say exactly what. Maybe it's the big menue and small content font, but I'm not sure that's it.

On the map of sussex, is there any way you could get the hotel stats to pop into the little bubble with the picture? If I was looking for a hotel, I'd go to the map first, then when I clicked on a little marker I'd want to know how many stars, price range, pool and other amenitites, etc.

Your site is mainly targeted for hotel bookers.So provide more information on that.I would rather recommend you to remove adsense ads from your site as it looks really different.

If you still want adsense it's better to blend it with the background picture you have.Change the background color of adsense into yellow this will make your site look more clear.

Best Of Luck