First off I have to comment on the beautiful photos on their front page.  These images alone make me want to take a weekend trip to this resort.  The colors are so clean and crisp I can imagine myself on top of the mountain breathing in the cool air.

Beaver Creek Resort in Colorado ranks third in the grooming of their trails  I think the photo to the left shows some of the beauty you’d see while skiing their slopes.

The page looks very well put together on the outside with a nice layout and use of their branding.  Let’s see how well they rank on my top three qualifiers.

Number one, how quickly can I see what the rooms look like.  This has got to be a top priority for any type of resort.  How quickly can I as a consumer rent a room or get time on a golf course or a pass for skiing at the resort.  This has got to be the main money maker for a site and it’s surprising how many sites don’t make this the main focus.

This one I’ll have to mark the site down on because it was a bit of a hunt and peck to find any information on the resort but ended with a surprise.   I couldn’t see right off anything that said lodging or something to that effect.  I started hunting along the main menu and finally found under Travel Plans and option for Lodging.  Then I was presented with still more options to pick from different locations.  This is difficult for someone who’s never been to any of the resort villages.  How do I know the difference?  After I made my way around I then noticed that if I scrolled all the way to the bottom there was a little area that blended into the background where I could search for a room.  While this functionality was there it’s hidden at the bottom and beyond the fold of my viewable area even though I have a large monitor and my browser was open 978px high.  I must say that this was a nice search feature when I did find it.  I was quickly able to see the properties and a price or price range for the property.

As for the ability to see a photo gallery, I think they’ve got this covered well as there is a great image that draws you into the photo gallery that includes videos, photos and web cameras.

If we review their site’s internal code it seems to be a hodge-podge of old and new styles.  They make use of CSS layout for some divs but then switch back to table-based layout with internal tag attributes.  This causes a number of errors both in the the HTML and the CSS which of course in turn have no option to be accessible and fails the accessibility test.

- 131 HTML errors
-4 CSS errors.
-Failed accessibility test

Overall I would give the site an B for form and a C function.

Coming in at number two on Ski Magazines best groomed runs is Mount Sunapee Resort in New Hampshire.  You can tell from spending just a few minutes on their web site that they’ve been around the block a time or two.  This is both good and bad.  It’s good because they’ve made it easy to find the information your looking for.  Within 10 seconds I was able to find lodging, photos of the lodging and how much it would cost me to stay there.  They have a nice selection of Bed & Breakfasts, Country Inn’s,  Hotels & Motels as well as Houses and Cottages.

The bad part about being around for so long is that the page looks dated.  There isn’t a freshness or attention payed to the detail of layout and branding.  Another dead givaway is looking into their code.  One of the first things that pops up is the Adboe Photoshop generated code for pre-loading images.  Then we start seeing the old and depricated table-based layout.  I must say though that I’ve seen much worse.  While they are using table-based layout it isn’t tortured by overbearing attributes, font tags and needless markup.  It is generally pretty clean code on the front-page.

There’s a lot of potential for this site as there are some beautiful surroundings but they are just not featured prominently enough.  There’s a lot of data on this site and it could be helped by giving it a good grooming just like they did for their ski trails.

- 61 HTML errors
-0 CSS errors.
-Failed accessibility test

Overall I would give the site an C for form and a A- function.

Deer Valley was ranked by Ski Magazine as the number one resort for grooming.  Their site was created by Humaniz Interactive Inc. who has done a great job with the site.  The site looks very clean and appealing to the eye. You can easily see that they’ve put a lot of work into the web site and it wasn’t merely an afterthought.  They display some nice information for skiers like a countdown to opening day (Dec. 6th) as well as the current weather at the resort (59 ° and partly cloudy).  There are a few items they can improve on however.

My top three areas to look at for hotel/lodging web sites are:

1. How quickly can I see the rooms?
2. How quickly can I find the rates?
3. How quickly can I find a photo gallery of the resort?

There is a beautiful single picture when  you click on accommodation and lodging of a downy soft bed.  My hope would be that all the rooms look like this, but I’m really not sure.  It would be helpful to know what types of rooms are available.

The second part of this is what is the price or at least the price range so I know how many bones it’s going to cost me to reserve a room for the night.

Lastly is the photo gallery.  I couldn’t easily find a photo gallery to show me the property or things to do there.  One thing that may compensate for this is the Deer Valley TV.  This area looks a bit sparse but it does seem to show you video of the resort.

If we take a look inside the code they do have very modern semantic markup with tableless design.  There appear to be a few errors and they fail the accessibility tests.  These seem like fairly simple bugs that they could clear up rather quickly.  I’d say not only does this rate very high for grooming of their trails but the grooming of their web site as well.  This makes the Deer Valley Resort web site stand out from the others. Good job all around!

Lastly I’d just like to thank Emily and the staff at Deer Valley for being so accommodating in providing images for use here on the Half Nutlog.

- 3 HTML errors
-10 CSS errors.
-Failed accessibility test

Overall I would give the site an A- for form and a B- function.

This morning while I was sitting in the waiting room for my dentist I picked up a copy of Ski Magazine.  They had a great article with spectacular pictures of the Top 50 Ski Resorts for 2008-2009.  If you’re a ski buff or a photography buff I’d recommend going out to your favorite book store and picking up a copy.  They have the same rankings on their web site and some of the pictures, but the articles that go in-depth about each resort are well worth the price of the magazine.

Since we’ve already had the first snow fall I thought it would be a good idea to review the resorts web pages and see if their web sites match up to the ranking of their resorts.  Just seeing some of these resorts wrapped in a blanket of snow makes me want to check some of these places out.  Even if your not a big skier, you can’t help but be drawn in by some of these resorts.

Top Grooming

1. Deer Valley, Utah
2. Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire
3. Beaver Creek, Colorado
4. Snowmass, Colorado
5. Vail, Colorado
6. Okemo, Vermont
7. Sun Valley, Idaho
8. Bretton Woods, New hampshire
9. Mammoth Mountain, California
10. Sunday River, Main

Top Terrain Variety

1. Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia
2. Mammoth mountain, California
3. Vail, Colorado
4. Jackson Hole, Wyoming
5. Squaw Valley, California
6. Alta, Utah
7. Big Sky, Montana
8. Snowbird, Utah
9. Sugarbush, Vermont
10. Sugarloaf, Maine

Top Challenging Terrain

1. Jackson Hole, Wyoming
2. Taos Ski Valley, new Mexico
3. Snowbird, Utah
4. Alta, Utah
5. Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia
6. Squaw Valley, California
7. Mammoth mountain, California
8. Aspen Highlands, Colorado
9. Big Sky, Montana
10. Arapahoe Basin, Colorado

Top Lifts

1. Snowbasin, Utah
2. Mammoth mountain, California
3. Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia
4. Deer Valley, Utah
5. Vail, Colorado
6. Snowmass, Colorado
7. Sun Valley, Idaho
8. Beaver Creek, Colorado
9. Squaw Valley, California
10. Schweitzer Mountain, Idaho

Top Resorts for Families

1. Smugglers’ Notch, Vermont
2. Steamboat, Colorado
3. Snowmass, Colorado
4. Tremblant, Quebec
5. Okemo, Vermont
6. Seven Springs, Pennsylvania
7. Deer Valley, Utah
8. Northstar-at-Tahoe, California
9. Bretton Woods, New Hampshire
10. Beaver Creek, Colorado

Top Resorts for Scenery

1. Wildcat, New Hampshire
2. Heavenly, California
3. Lake Louise, Alberta
4. Telluride, Colorado
5. Jackson Hole, Wyoming
6. Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire
7. Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia
8. Aspen Highlands, Colorado
9. Bretton Woods, New Hampshire
10. Whitefish, Montana

Since today is blog action day for poverty I’d like to plug the organization we’ve focused on which is Food for Hungary Minds.  This is an organization based on providing funds to help children in impovrished areas gain education to pull themselves out of poverty.

“If Habitat could create a way for an individual or an organization to help a family own their home, why couldn’t something similar be created for high-quality education? Education is what made them global colleagues. Education was the road out of poverty. Education could bring people together across the biggest global divisions.”

The other day my mom IM’d me and my brother to let us know that my “little” cousin Mikey aka Mike Aitken the BMX Super Star crashed big and was in a coma.  My heart instantly sank and I felt sick all day.  Our thoughts and prays are going out to him and his family and hope he has a swift and full recovery.  You can read more about his condition as it gets updated on his site MikeAitken.com.

If you feel so inclined you can make a donation on his behalf to the Athlete Recover Fund.  Due to the extreme nature of his occupation he’s unable to get insurance so it would be great if you could dig deep and find it in your hearts to help him and his family as we all know hospitals are not cheep or free.

Mike is an awesome guy and very generous and giving, really the kind of guy that deserves help.  Karma is bound to make the rounds here as I’ve seen comments, wishes and donations from around the world.  Mike has really touched a lot of people and we’re seeing the effects of that now.

Yahoo had an interesting article posted on their site today about America’s Prettiest Towns.
Lo and behold our own Springdale made the list. The list also included Flagstaff, Arizona and Rockport, Maine.

“Among the traveler writer’s pretty-town favorites are Springdale, Utah, situated near Zion National Park…”

As is typical most of the media lean towards cities on the East coast with New England ranking at the top of everyone’s list as well as including New Hampshire, Main, Vermont and Rhode Island.

Half Nut Development has taken a look at the blogging scene in Utah and we’ve come up with a few blogs in a number of categories that are part of our Utah’s Best Blogs.  It seems fitting that that a majority of the blogs out there fit into a few non-surprising categories.  There are a lot of sports, technology and political blogs out there representing Utah.  Of course we have our share of outdoor activities enjoying the great bit of mother nature we are blessed with.  Here are our nominees for the Best Blogs in Utah.  If you know of a great blog in these or any other categories please send them to us for our consideration.

Sports Blogs

BYU

1. http://provopride.com/ -Provo Pride, The Unofficial BYU Cougars Blog
2. http://blogs.sltrib.com/byu/ -The Salt Lake Tribune Cougar Blog
3. http://deseretnews.com/blogs/1,5322,19,00.html -Deseret News BYU Cougars Blog

Utah Utes

1. http://www.blocku.com/ -Block U
2. http://deseretnews.com/blogs/1,5322,20,00.html -Deseret News Utah Utes Blog
3. http://www.theuteblog.com/?cat=2 -The Ute Blog

Utah Jazz

1. http://blogs.sltrib.com/jazz/ -The Salt Lake Tribune
2. http://thecowhideglobe.blogspot.com/ -The Cowhide Globe
3. http://www.jazzbots.com/web/ -The jazzbots.com
4. http://www.utahjazzblog.net/ -Utah Jazz Blog.net
5. http://www.slcdunk.com/ -SLC Dunk

Outdoor Activities Blogs

1. http://www.skiutah.com/blog/ -Ski Utah Bloggin the Greatest Snow on Earth
2. http://blog.rideutah.com/ -Ride Utah Blog, Shredding Utah

Music/Arts Blogs

1. http://www.utahsymphony.org/blog/ -Utah Symphony
2. http://slweekly.com/index.cfm?do=blogs.list&nav=SALT%20BLOG -SLWeekly

Politics Blogs

1. http://www.skibumpoet.com/ -Ski Bum Poet
2. http://magicvalleymormon.blogspot.com/
3. http://www.utahpolitics.org/ -Utah Politics.org
4. http://blogs.sltrib.com/utahpolitics/ -The Salt Lake Tribune Utah Politics

Technology Blogs

1. http://www.mwi.com/blog/ -MWI
2. http://www.redolivedesign.com/utah-web-designers-blog/ -Red Olive Design
3. http://www.lunawebs.com/blog/ -Luna Webs

House/Home Blogs

1. http://theutahrealestateblog.com/ -The Real Estate Blog

Travel Blogs

1. http://www.utah.com/travelheadlines/ -Utah.com Travel Blog
2. http://ogdenvalley.blogspot.com/ -Ogden Valley Blogspot

Feel free to use one of our badges on your site to show people that you’re one of Utah’s Best Blogs.

If you would like a blog of your own or need some work done on an existing blog we can help. Just contact sales@halfnutdevelopment.com.