Owning a vacation rental site has its perks. Every day I get the illustrious opportunity to help users upload photos to their listings. No matter how easy I make it, there are always a bunch who just can’t figure it out. The same thing is true for adding a Google Map. Nonetheless I get to review tons and tons of vacation rental websites every week. I would say roughly 50% of them are complete junk, 35% do a good job and 15% are completely amazing.
Here are the 5 most stupid website mistakes that I see very single stinking day.
1. Shrinking a 1mb 1028×764 pixel image into a 100×100 square. To further the offense, they then repeat this for at least 10 images on the same page. The result is a very slow loading page and images that are grainy and distorted. The sad thing is that when I click on “view image” and see the full picture, many times they are great pictures.
2. Image width less then 250 pixels. Hello people….you own a vacation rental, people want to see large images of your unit. Not little thumbnails.
3. Sound. I cannot believe how many people think it’s cute to put up some annoying beach music on their website. 10 years ago this was novel, now it’s extremely annoying. Usually these are the same people that shrink their 1mb images down to 100×100 or smaller.
4. Dark and unclear images. Seriously, why would anybody promote their vacation rental and use dark, dingy, unclear pictures to promote it? You would not believe the number of vacation rental owners that take just horrible pictures and proceed to put them up on their website.
5. and finally my worst pet peeve, are large annoying, myspace like, background images that either repeat themselves across the entire page or are nearly the same color as the text of your website.
It is not at all uncommon to see websites containing all five elements on the same page. To illustrate my point, I am coding a new application that will automatically post the junkiest websites that I come across to this blog. I love my customers and all, but someone has to call them out. Sometimes an intervention is needed.