Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Very nice website for a hotel in one of my favorite cities.

I agree with Phil about the type size. I'd also add that you have a lot of copy on the homepage, and I suspect that will deter most people from reading any of it. I had to force myself to get through the first sentence ... just because there is so much there. You'll get more people reading anything if there's less there to read.

Another suggestion: Short captions for each image. People WILL read captions. Perhaps you can make the important points in the captions.

Your primary selling point, I think, is that you're in the heart of the city. You will benefit if you can effectively sell Vancouver/downtown ... and then be the nicest, most convenient, best value, etc. in downtown Vancouver. (That is, start with a missionary sale for downtown Vancouver; then sell your unique positioning benefit.)

Separate observation: The lack of reference to any meeting facilities is, I suppose, intentional. You don't have any? What would you say to someone who asked about booking a meeting at the hotel? Or is it there and I just missed it because I was too lazy to read the long bullet-point lists?

The background color is competing too much with the graphic boxes. Make what's less important lighter in color to make it recede on the page.

What does the front of the hotel look like? You're showing a slide show of images of the city, but not showing me the accomodations as well.

Do you have a newer brochure than a 2008 (for downloading)?

Because you're an all suite hotel, break up the heading:

Welcome to Sunset Inn & Suites, a Premier All
Suite Downtown Vancouver Hotel

- to be -

Welcome to Sunset Inn & Suites
A Premier All-Suite Downtown Vancouver Hotel

Add alt-tags to all your images. It's an extra opportunity for SEO.

Your USP has WAAAAY too many thoughts in it. A good USP is like a good positioning statement: single-minded, focused on the most important benefit. Yours is just too complex, hard to digest quickly. (I think I counted a dozen different ideas!)

If you asked all your hotel guests what they liked about the hotel, what single response would get the most mentions. That might be a good candidate for your USP.

The problem with the complex version (like yours) is that it's impossible to communicate in a sound bite, and people can only remember sound bites.

One more comment:

You wrote: "It's always a battle between what looks good vs. giving the reader as much information as possible, to educate the reader about our features and location."

That's the wrong way to think about it. You should NOT be trying to "educate the reader about your features and location." You should be trying to satisfy the most important need of your target audience.

You're trying to give them more information than they need, and that's just going to communicate that you have your priorities all jumbled up. Everything can't be as important as the thing that's most important to them.

This is another reason why you might want to segment your audience up-front and then deliver a very specific message to each segment. (If I want a Photoshop expert, it doesn't help me to know that a candidate is also an auto mechanic. In fact, it could make me think the person is unfocused.)

Another thought: Focus your attention on the objective. What is it you want your site visitor to do? What's the call to action? Every sentence and every page of the site should lead or point to that result.

If you're trying to give people a lot of information, and if you expect them to actually care about it all, you're not being realistic. What you should be doing is asking yourself, "What does this person need to know in order to take the action I want them to take?" And then you probably ought to go through the site (again) and make sure the CTA is very clear on every page.

If you haven't read "The Big Red Fez" lately, it's worth the hour it will take you to read it. The main point of the book is that the CTA is the single most important element of every webpage. Make sure it's not hidden, missing or hard to find. (Book details here: https://bit.ly/a1KQJc)

Here's a short snippet from the book that captures the essence:

"One of the best ways to remind yourself about what's really going on [when someone visits a Web site] is to think of a monkey in a big red fez..."

"The best way to motivate the monkey [to take a desired action], of course, is to use a banana. Whenever a monkey walks into a new situation, all it wants to know is, 'Where's the banana?' If the banana isn't easy to see, easy to get and obvious, the monkey is going to lose interest. But if you can make it clear to the monkey what's in it for him, odds are he'll do what you want."

Obviously, the monkey is the website visitor and the banana is the incentive mechanism. Make sure your monkey can't miss the banana!