Basic but...

This is my first effort at designing a site and I was wondering if anyone could give me any ideas as to how good/bad it is?

Any suggestions for developments would be much appreciated!!

http://www.churchdaleholidays.co.uk

Cheers people.

That's pretty good. The left hand menu makes navigation easy. The pages are uncluttered and the light background makes for ease of viewing.

I would suggest losing the tiled "Churchdale Holidays" background and instead having a plain white background with the "Churchdale Holidays" logo at the top of every page as a graphic (rather than HTML text).

Also, for each page, put a page title at the top - "Prices", "Derwent Cottage" etc, as it's easy to forget what house you're viewing!

The blue Tourism Council logo would look better alongside the text description rather than above the text on its own - you can use the "ALIGN=RIGHT" (or LEFT) attribute of the IMG tag to achieve this.

Overall - nice design, easy on the eye. Good stuff!

Best wishes,
Matt
Elated

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

Just two suggestions...

The overlapping main and subtitles are really hard to distinguish. In fact, the subtitle almost disappears into the body of the main title.

Also...you'll have to excuse my "Yank" mentality...but it took me awhile to realize that all three cottages are contained within the one building shown on the front page (That is correct, isn't it?) When I think of a cottage, I think of a stand-alone building. If I'm completely off base here, and there ARE three separate cottages...you might consider adding the outside photos of the other two as well.

With the negative stuff out of the way, I just want to add that your site is very "inviting." The moment I saw the outside photo, I wanted to be there. The setting looks very lovely...can you add more photos of the surroundings, perhaps even the neaby town?

On my next trip to England, I'll see if you have a vacancy!

John
A yank living in Korea

Cheers guys I will take these comments into account when I get time to do a redesign!

I see what you mean about a cottage being free standing but this is what the owners wanted!
I will try and see if I can get some more pictures.

Thanks again

Henry