Found a great site today. While it may not be the cheapest, it is sure to be a trip to remember. The Bora Bora Lagoon Resort and Spa is part of the Orient Express franchise and radiates luxury and sophistication.

At first glance their web site seems to match their level of sophistication, but spending more than a passing glance on the site you start to notice some deficiencies. Two of the most important items to have easily available is the booking form on the primary and secondary screens and to have the photo gallery as readily accessible. Overall from my T1 connection here in the U.S. the site seems a bit slow to access their booking engine one click away. Also they have the obligatory flash photo stream on the front page that goes no where when you click it. What an opportunity is missed to send people to a nice photo gallery.

They show 56 html errors on the first page with a valid css style sheet. Diving into their source code reveals many opportunities to clean up their code and speed up their overall design. In their code you’ll find:

• deprecated tags
• Bloated internal JavaScript
• in-line styles
• deprecated attributes
• table-based layout
• overall poorly laid out source code

All this shows why their YSlow score is an F (56). I would expect a bit more from such a reputable company as the Orient Express. It also fails the section 508 usability tests for patrons with disabilities.

Overall I would give the site a C and possibly a B just because of an impeccable product and brand. However I would love to give this site a makeover to increase the speed, accessibility and usability.

Wow, I’ve been so busy lately with new clients that I’ve neglected the Half Nutlog a bit.
Reading Authentic Boredom today I saw an article about how Intel has declared Fridays as zero email days.

What a concept, I’m very interested to see how it works out. What’s more is to see how their customers respond. It’s one thing not to answer internal email, but what about correspondence from their customers. I’m wondering if they’ll be training their customers to phone in their questions that day or just how this will be handled.

My personal solution is to do a triage of the messages as they come in unless I’m completely involved in a task (coding, designing, etc) . If it’s something I can quickly answer I’ll do it. If not I put it off until later in the evening.

There are many sites out there who rank airlines by service or percentage of on-time arrivals, this however is not one of those sites. Half Nut Development reviews their web sites. For many it’s the first interaction with an airline and you know what they say about first impressions. This is the chance to make their sites easy to use and gain a repeat customer or conversely frustrate a user so much that they leave the site. We’ve seen many of each of these type of sites and have ranked them accordingly.

We review sites on usability, accessibility, compliance with web development standards and much much more. The purpose is to let the airlines themselves as well as their patrons know just how they are doing in the battle to maintain a corporate level web site. This is no trivial task and that makes it that much more impressive for airlines who are meeting or exceeding expectations.

Check out the reviews now!

If you are from an airline and would like your site reviewed just let us know and we’ll give you an honest and fair evaluation. Who knows, you could be like one of the airlines in the August Review of best overall front-page.

• Avior Airlines -Review
• Firefly Airlines -Review
• Fly Thomas Cook -Review

If you’ve read much of the Half Nut blog at all you’ll know I’m not a big fan of Flash. Flash in and of itself is not necessarily evil, but it’s so often misused that I’ve grown to dislike it immensely. So often navigation and patterns of the web are broken and/or misused.

I had a new client contact me today about building a web 2.0 site and it got me thinking that I couldn’t recall any well known web 2.0 web sites that have Flash on their home page. This alone is a good case against Flash. One of the goals of these new sites is to keep things simple and easy to use.

• Technorati - Flash for ads only
• 43 Things - No Flash
• Flickr - No Flash
• Picnik - No Flash
• Linkedin - No Flash
• Facebook - No Flash
• Rollyo - No Flash
• del.icio.us - No Flash
• Rollyo - No Flash
• Stumble Upon - No Flash
• You Tube - No Flash

Chances are if you take a quick look through your favorite web 2.0 website they won’t have any Flash or that Flash will not play any significant part in the site. I would venture to guess that one of the reasons is that many of these high-traffic sites don’t want the bloat associated with Flash.

Don’t get me wrong, Flash has it’s place and in the right hands I have seen some amazing things done with it. Those however are few and far between.

Am I wrong, let me know?

The Greenbrier is a magnificent hotel that I can’t wait to stay at. It’s intrigued me ever since I first browsed upon it’s pages.

“The Greenbrier is an award-winning resort located in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. As a National Historic landmark, The Greenbrier’s classic architecture, exquisite interior design, carefully sculpted landscape, impeccable service and outstanding amenities have hosted distinguished guests from around the world since 1778″ - The Greenbrier Web Site

http://www.greenbrier.com/

Last year my family and friends went on a trip to our family cabin in Idaho and we took a day trip into Yellowstone. It was a beautiful day and we stopped at many of the sites on the way to see Old Faithful.

It’s a rather nice drive as we go through three different states in a matter of half an hour to get there. We start out in Idaho, go through Montana and into Wyoming.

I got a few good shots, take a look.

In what is being touted as the “iPhone Killer” Verizon has released three new PDA phones.

Sources say it out-performs the iPhone in the speed of it’s wireless network, but I think that’s about all you can say. First off Verizon doesn’t seem to have the marketing power and experience that Apple does. I’ve searched the web several times trying to find information or more specifically images of the phone and all I find is little thumbnails in news articles. Verizon’s web presence is so disjointed that I’m unable to find anything on these new phones.

Alternatively when you visit Apples site you can find information about the iPhone either on the home page or a single click away. So for the so called Verizon iPhone killer, I say get in line.

A federal judge in California certified a class action lawsuit against Target Corp brought by plaintiffs claiming the discount retailer’s Web site is inaccessible to the blind, according to court documents.

This is an interesting case especially for those of use interested in standards and accessibility.
This could open the box for other suits like it all over the country. I think this case needs to be handled carefully. While I’m all for accessibility I’m also not in favor of mass litigation. If Target falls in this case, who’s next?

Thoughts?

I did a quick analysis of some Asian Pacific Airline websites this morning and found that you definitely get what you pay for. Some of the smaller airlines look like they didn’t get a development staff who were quite up to snuff on modern ways to develop web pages. Their image content is way out of control and their markup could definitely use some optimization.

Take a look at these and you decide which ones are corporate level and which ones need some assistance.

http://www.mandalaair.com/
http://www.pacificairlines.com.vn/
http://www.airasia.com/site/my/en/home.jsp
http://www.jetstar.com/au/index.html

Yesterday I saw an article on 37 signals about how Apple has just released a new icon for interaction with iTunes on the iPhone. The placement of the icon is directly above the iTunes button to the far right hand side. It’s displayed there when a common pattern to follow would be to place it in the next available spot on the left hand side of the display.

Now there are many purists who would say that it should remain consistent and stay on the left hand side. Even though I am consistently trying to stay consistent, I can see how this makes sense. It surely makes sense from a proximity point of view. Why not put the interaction icon as close as possible to the tool that will be using it? There is also much to be said about some of the arguments for “it just feels right”.

I think because it’s a iPhone makes a difference also. If it were a desktop it would be one thing, but since this is a portable piece of hardware the interface is focused more on accomplishing things quickly and with as few touch points or reaches as possible. Makes sense to me.

What’s more is that if you look at the iPod Touch it’s consistent with the placement of it’s iTunes. So the constancy is across devices.