Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
Four seasons have chosen and owned a short and a suitable domain name. As a result, its domain name has been easily memorized by its clients.
Website Health Check Form
Analysis of the report
Design/Conversion Features
Hotel and destination images
The Four Season’s website shows various hotels and destination images. The homepage displays the image of the hotel headquarters in Toronto- Canada. Users are then prompted to click on ‘Find a hotel or a resort. On clicking, various hotel or resort names are displayed from across the globe. A click at any one of them displays the image of the hotel or the resort.
Showing of video
Each hotel or resort link provides users with a provision to view photos or videos.
Use of flash
The site has adopted a minimum use of flash thus it is likely to remain appealing to most users.
Embedding of social media
The site has embedded social media (Facebook and Twitter) on its homepage. This is likely to increase its popularity since these social media are likely to be used as both pull and push technologies to increase its market share.
Ease of navigation
It is very easy to navigate on this site. A user will only be re-directed for a maximum of two clicks before accessing the next page. This is likely to improve on-time management since users are likely to spend less time interacting with the site.
Reservations’ link
The site has a ‘reservations and rates’ link on all pages. This is likely to enhance its marketing. However, the site fails to accompany this link with a visible reservation phone number. To inquire on their reservations, clients are required to apply their logic and use the contact link where visible phone numbers for US and Canada are hotels are provided. This weakness might prevent the hotel from winning on some of its potential customers.
Email offers
Though the company requests some of its users to contact it through e-mail on the contact page, it should be pointed out that a click on this link does not provide that offer. This is also a weakness of this site.
Offers
Ideally, the Four Season website lists accommodation, Spa, leisure activities amongst others as some of its services on offer. However, on clicking on these services, the site fails to present any figures or packages associated with the special offers. This is also likely to act against its growth since potential customers are may sense ‘a hidden agenda’ on this gesture.
Calls to action
The site describes clearly the key phrases or words on its pages. This has the potential of persuading its customers into buying its services.
Content
The content is written for the consumers. This is because the hotel has identified its core business services as accommodations, celebrations, weddings, and the provision of residences (rental services) amongst others. As such, it has addressed most travelers’ needs. Besides, this content is written for the search engine because the management has used strategies that increase the site ranking order.
Visibility of the site map
The company’s site map is clearly visible and gives the user a rough idea of the contents of the site. Its site map has its locations, About Four Seasons, Multimedia and Tools, Visiting Four Seasons and Special Interests (Four Seasons Homepage 2011).
Download time
According to the statistics from Fagan Finder Homepage (2008), Four Seasons download time is 87.24 seconds for its total size page of 405611 bytes. The management should consider reducing its total size (say below 100k) to achieve a download response time of about 20 seconds
SEO and SEM Features
Page Rank
The site does not have any page rank on any of its pages. It is therefore hard to determine its popularity.
Header Tags
The site has a considerable number of header tags which have many sub-header tags beneath them. For example, the Residences H1 is manifested with the following H2’s Private Residences, Ownership Options and The Four Seasons Experience (Four Seasons Homepage, 2011). All these are found in the keyword-searchable list thus increasing its search engine success.
Anchor Links
Four Seasons has anchor links for most of its hyperlinks. It should be noted that anchor links contain the same description as the hyperlinks and are therefore keyword rich. For example, the anchor link for ‘Residence Clubs’ is Residence Clubs.
Presence of Tags
Four Seasons website has employed the use of several tags which are keyword rich. For example four seasons, hotel resort, resort, hotel, resorts, home, and many more. These tags slightly vary from page to page. However, according to the statistics from Fagan Finder (2008), it should be pointed out that the site has only I image alt tag-available at four seasons resorts and hotels (Fagan Finder Homepage, 2008). The management should consider increasing these tags for its varying images to improve their search.
Site-map xml presence
The site is XML fed though with a presence of a warning error message that they are unable to locate your site.
Presence of robot text
The robot text is present but not validated since it returns an error (similar to the site-map XML error above).
Search and Local listing
Four Seasons appears organically when a simple search is performed of its key words-four seasons. However, due to its multiple locations, the hotel’s image is absent from any local listing. For instance, a search of the hotel in Canada by Canadian citizens will not relay the image of the hotel but would list its global locations.
Link popularity
Four seasons link is unrecognized by both Google and Yahoo search engines. However, the link is registered with a comprehensive and reputable search engine called Altvista. This has increased its search popularity by 82800.
404 error check
The site’s robots and site map are validated. A check on the status of the 404 error shows North Carolina as the company’s headquarters. Users are then re-directed to view the exact location on a provided external sitemap (Google earth /sitemap).
Site re-direction
A search of the URL without www redirects the user to the homepage. This is achieved despite a slight difference in the URL being displayed.
References
Fagan Finder Homepage (2008). Fagan Finder: About URLinfo. Web.
Four Seasons Homepage (2011). Four Seasons hotels and resorts.