http://www.RealAdventures.com - need to improve conversions

Tom,
I think you have done a very nice job so far with your web site! I'm guessing you want to draw people in and have them stay awhile so here are a few suggestions:

Your domain name, logo & byline is very inspiring "Real Adventures" "Life Is An Adventure, Live It!" "Incredible Vacations & Great Getaways!" but where are these great adventures?

The top of your page says this: RealAdventures: Incredible Vacations & Great Getaways! Explore exciting destinations, relaxing getaways, unique vacations, cool adventures, once in a lifetime trips and great accommodations & resorts. But I don't see anything very exciting. If I'm looking for a incredible vacation, a once in a lifetime trip I probably have a little bit of money yet your first 2 listings...that are getting that all important first visual space are for hostels and backpacking trips. For heavens sake! How relevant is that to what you claim your site is via your domain name & logo? Then your 3rd choice is for an area that was just hit by a hurricane!

I would suggest you take another look at your main page. I'd list only a few really exotic vacations on it and try drawing your visitors in from there.

I would also suggest, if hostels are a lucrative area for you, that you dedicate a category to just that.

I hope these opinions are of benefit to you.

Sam Warren
Picnic-Basket.com

One thing that stood out to me when first viweing the page, was in fact just as r3a1 put it, the white titles on the yellow background are pretty much impossible for me to read unless i click and highlight over it...then I know what they say. Again, I am using Firefox as well...

Also another thing I noticed. For example, I clicked on Europe and then click on Russia. Then there was a listing of different sites to click on under 'Russia Travel, vacations & accommodations. When you click on one of those links, let's say the 'Travel to Russia' link, it opens in the same window, pulling the user away from your site. You may want to have links to other sites open up in new windows... just something to think about.

I'm definitely not an expert, but that is what I noticed. I hope this helps.

Muldoon

On a more techical side of things, I think that the CSS needs some work. On the menu in the left where "Top Picks" & "Search RealAdventures" are white on a light yellow, very hard to read. Also I saw alot of sections that didn't line up with the rest of the page. I'm using Firefox so you might check out how the page looks in other broswers.

Not the worst site i've seen in the website critique area but to be honest that's nothing to get excited about.

It lacks a bit of inspiration...you could say it's lacking any real adventure (boom boom) in the style stakes

As Megan has said there are too many links, how about some information? A site will only be successful if it is customer focused. Maybe the people you should be asking are the visitors...?

-Rob

I think the problem is that it feels like a link farm. The listings don't really have a lot of detail and I don't know what I'm going to be getting if I click one. It might ge good to use more of a tabled display where you have some details about the destination (like price, what type of ammenities they have, proximity to major attractions etc.)

I wouldn't say that the design is a huge problem. It's not the best but for a site like this isn't not going to be a deal breaker for the audience. It's more about how the information is organized. The only reall problem I had was that the left menu disappears on sub-pages and that was weird.

I noticed under "active & sports" you don't have a category for yoga - yoga travel is a pretty big industry. Last year when I was looking for places to go I had a really hard time finding a central source of information.

On the maps, I think you should be able to zoom in futher on the destinations. I think there are some new plugins for google maps that would be really great for this.

Um, now I see - most of the ads are google listings! No wonder if feels like a link farm.

To my mind the biggest problem you face here is how busy the pages look, it's like Yahoo when they started trying to be everything to everyone!

Looking at these pages the brain just switches off because of the vast amount of content all trying to grab my attention at the same time.

Think about your users, think about what they want and get back to the core of the service you provide! That's one of the main reasons for the success of Google, people going there want to search, and that's what Google gave them and nothing else. There's no: "Featured Searches" "Top Searches" "Exciting Searches" "Great Search Ideas" on Google - no-one cares! They already know what they want, and I would expect most of the people coming to your site also know what they want but are bamboozled by wealth of choices you're trying to provide!

The other problem is that I keep seeing trailers everywhere, I know there are other options available but that first impression is sticking in my mind. This is the same problem again, you're almost trying to tell people what they want when they already know! The suggestion here is to keep things generic, it would be a good idea to show featured holidays under the relevant category, in this instance the user has told you what they want so you can target them with the right featured holiday ads.

The design itself is somewhat untidy and smells a little spammy IMO, this may well be due to the sheer amount of content, if you cut things down and clean up then some time could be allocated to jazzing the design up!

well the only thing I can think of is maybee have afull sized globe at the start of the site so that all the can see is your logo and a world map globe that moves with mouse and looks very appealing something done in flash then they will have to pick a destination and therefore make it further into your site...just an idea ..wish i had an example to show you..