If anyone tries to tell you that running a cycling tour business is ‘seasonal’, send him over to me and I’ll put him to work in the winter. When you aren’t out on your bike looking for new routes, or turning those routes into new tours, you’re changing your old name and upgrading your antique 2-yr old website. And that’s what John and I have been doing!
The results are:
- A brand new name: 44|5 Cycling Tours
- A new logo (well, our only logo, actually). John did a great job on this, I think. We went back and forth for weeks on both the look and, especially, the colors. We wanted something a tiny bit retro (we are, after all!), pleasing to the eye, and inoffensive. I kinda like it.
- A new site, which you can link to above. We are pretty content with the results, mainly because we would have nobody other than ourselves to blame if we weren’t. It is a work in progress and will only look better if I don’t jump off the balcony in frustration first. The website is a ‘scrolly’ type, but here’s what you see at the top when you land on us.
We are also working on some great new tours, which will be showing themselves in due course. We are pretty excited about this whole move, since it is finally a complete break from the mixed bag of content on Cycling Languedoc’s website (still up, by the way – it will live on and hopefully continue to be a useful resource) and we are heading full-throttle in the direction we envisioned from the start.
Off to bed to hopefully dream about anything other than 404 error messages and permalink failures.
The Vicious Cycle 
A lot of hard work.
Mostly a lot of troubleshooting stuff we didn’t know, but yes, it was hard.
If you were writing the HTML or whatever the latest equivalent is yourself, it always seems to be a matter of looking for the elusive misplaced punctuation.
I can see you’ve done some of this yourself. I’ve never really written any code, but I’ve certainly lost lots of punctuation when copying and pasting. Easily 75% of my time with this website has been troubleshooting problems I never knew existed before.
I can quite believe that. The result looks smart.
Just spent some time on your new site … very successful ….. Easy to navigate, easy to find information, and it looks great!
Thanks, Suze. We have a long list of things we want to tweak, but I’m happy, more or less, with this first version.
One little nit … the banner image looks naff on a tablet (Nexus 7) in portrait mode. You get some legs and tarmac only. Other than that, nice work!
That’s great feedback, thanks! I just changed something and will check with John and his tablet later. But if you you’re still up (or up early), you’re free to let me know if it worked. Cheers.
Beautiful 🙂
Gerry, The new name…..it maybe me ( not the brightest in the peleton) but I do not understand what it means? Can not think what the numbers refer to ie France, cycling, the region? I opened the new site on a mini computer and the first picture is road and legs only. The rest are OK. Good work overall.
Bryan, did you open that this morning? I’m trying to fix that ‘leg’ problem now. Is it still the same? The name: looooong story about how we landed on it, but it is not going to be evident to anyone for sure! It’s the latitude and longitude of Mont Ventoux, more or less, which has meaning, but only to us!
Just had a quick look Gerry……..looking good Houston, as they say!!!! As for the name I did say to myself “I wonder if it co-ordinates” but as I did not know them I let it go……maybe I am brighter then I thought!! LoL!
Constructive criticism hopefully? Using an iPad, on the front page the 2nd picture of a bend(?) looks fuzzy & out of kilter. On some of the pages there are big gaps between the photos and the text. On the basic Essentials page there are no links to the other bits in that category. Also some page seem slow to load, maybe because of the photo sizes? Otherwise excellent & best of luck with it.
Very constructive! I’m not sure what to do about that 2nd photo on the homepage, but I’ll look into it. The gaps are a problem I haven’t figured out either, but for now there’s nothing I can do but ignore it and hope it goes away! I’ve fixed the Essentials tab to now just do nothing, which was my initial intention. If you click on it now it wont ‘move’, hopefully telling people to look below to the menu. I’ve reduced most of the photos, but maybe I need to do more. I’m sure I’ve missed a few. Thanks for the helpful feedback!
Gerry, I use a mac and a wee progamme called imagewell. It is great at compressing photos to fit a web page, without losing clarity.
Gerry, the site looks damn sexy – chapeau!
Sarah, ‘sexy’ wasn’t the intention, but I’ll take it! Thanks.
I looked over the website and it looks great. The tours also look spectacular.