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 entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Accessibility, CSS, Design, HTML, Hotels, Reviews, SEO, Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.