New Mambo and Soho sites

[Kimbot]

Hey Forum folks....

We are almost finished 2 websites for hotel reservations in Thailand.

One site is done with Mambo, the other with Soho.

Anybody want to take a look and give us any and all feedback, good and bad, it would be appreciated.

Nuffin like a bit of Peer Review, eh?

Here they are:

www.kohsamuihotel.biz

www.samuihotel.biz

No prizes for guessing which one is Mambo and which one is Soho ;-)

cheers

Kim "last day as baby croc - soon to be junior croc" Carter

[Kimbot]

My Cane Toad cries in sorrow that nobody comments on these sites.

Booo bloody hooo

[esl]

So are we supposed to pick our favorite? I personally love www.samuihotel.biz and find it ALOT easier to navigate. I think www.kohsamuihotel.biz may be a bit more attractive if you changed the grey on the side bar to the right.

[Kimbot]

No favorites esl. Thanks for comments.

A bit of feedback helps.

The samuihotel.biz site is Mambo, plenty of room to make or tweak templates.

The kohsamuihotel.biz is SohoLaunch, pretty basic stuff compared to Mambo, pretty limited. Even if you purchase the Pro version you only get a few more plugins, nothing you can't plugin yourself from some other source anyway. But can't even do things like move the menu to the right or other simple stuff.

Soho is nice all the same, very easy and fast to get it up and running.

As you can see, they are both realy the same sites. I know that is not truly kosher, but whatever, I wanted to try both systems out to see how the search engines rank one against the other.

I have had a suspicion for some time now that the googlebot has a secret love affair with certain Mambo layouts. So it seems, I see a lot of poorly built Mambo sites that still rank very highly for specific search terms.

So, it is a bit of business and a bit of research all in one.

Thanks for the input.

cheers

[Serra]

Originally Posted by Kimbot

Soho is nice all the same, very easy and fast to get it up and running.

Yea, very easy. My 9 year old was using Soho and decided that it would be easier to just use Dreamweaver.

[Kimbot]

Sera, this is true.

I have clients who paid me to make Mambo sites, paid me more to train their staff.

Then get me to update everything anyway, via Mambo, and pay me again.

I am not complaining but you are right, many CMS are no more or less difficult to learn than to learn DW or FP or whatever.

Nevertheless, somebody gotta use it or the poor coders would be out of work, yes?

Still, Soho and Mambo are fun I reckon. Just another way to skin a cat.

And since when do bots have 9 year olds anyway?

What? Is that like a mini-me-bot?

[mahaffy]

Hey, Kim. Still knowing nothing (like any idiot at an art showing) I'll try to help with comments. The kohsamuihotel.biz is the more attractive and usable site (larger typeface), though the straight-across color highlighting on the samuihotel.biz makes that giant list FEEL easier to use. Too, the stuff on the right sidebar (samuihotel.biz) makes me think you got bored one afternoon -- a bit busy and distracts from the main purpose. I would also point out, to be nit-picky, that a serif face (English Times, etc) is more legible than a sans-serif face. Your lists -- to keep the clean look -- are OK, but the descriptions in the hotel links might better be E.T.

-- john

[Kimbot]

Hi John. Thank you for comments.

>Still knowing nothing (like any idiot at an art showing)

Better still, not too many preconceptions. More objective. I always show my Thai wife new web stuff, get her opinion precisely because she is not a developer, just an end user.

The stuff on the right column of samuihotel.biz is "modules" that are very fasionable, quite trendy ;-) However, point taken.

The only problem I had is that I want to keep the banners, the exchange rate and the polls. When they are over on the left side then the left column just goes down forever - and ever.

But I may change that now, only takes a minute, after reading your comment. Maybe I'll put them all on the left and see how it looks.

Regards serif and sanserfit fonts, I had read that sanserif was easier to read. Then I read that serif was easier to read. I have poor eyesight, for sure for me sanserif is more clear. I think it is a debatable point of view, eh?

Hotel descriptions are courtesy of the online booking system we use. However, I could manually edit them. Make them prettier.

Interesting you prefer the kohsamuihotel.biz site - everybody including my fine missus prefers the samuihotel.biz site. Just shows that you can keep all the people happy some of the time, etc, etc....

Cheers and thanks for your input, it is of value to us.