Website

I've written a couple of posts in the past about our website www.la-matha.com.  The site has always been simple and straightforward.  Upgrades I've put in place over the years have been restricted to a new "flashy" new photo gallery written in HTML5 rather than Flash, and the introduction of buttons which change when the mouse hovers over them.  Our thinking was to just keep it simple, and let the property do the talking.

Talking to a Google advertising re-seller, I realised how poor the site was as a marketing tool, compared to what it could be.  That was perhaps borne out by the fact that we have had no lettings directly from the website.  The re-seller wanted me to buy his web-design service, but that would have meant me losing control of the content, and I didn't want that.  I found that his service used an on-line tool called Wix, which can be free, if you want their advertising on it, or you can pay for an unbranded site.  However, studying a site that had been produced using it, it became clear that even with the paid for service, a lot of the content and coding was retained by Wix - losing control again!

So, I set about re-writing the site loosely based on a Wix design I had been toying with.  The result, if I say so myself, is a big improvement.  It may not have the slick sliding progression as you move page by page (I think done by HTML5), but I have got a small slide show on each page, drop-down menus using CSS, the menu and formatting are all on separate files, so if I want to add a page, all I need to do is to change the menu once, and the change appears on all the pages.  I've now even updated the French version of the site, so that it is the same, albeit in French!  I have just finished adding a form for visitors to use to contact me - possible now, as I have had to upgrade the hosting so that I can use PHP, a relatively new programming language which allows for the menu to be on a single page which is referred to by all the others.

Anyway, check it out - I hope you like it!