France This Way...the blog!!

I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently while I modernised the france this way site – I was feeling guilty that it looked a bit 1990′s, and should be more ‘interactive’ with visitors.

While I’m OK on the technical stuff I’m completely rubbish on design, so it’s taken me two years to come up with a design I’m reasonably happy with – next time I’ll just pay someone to do a design for me.

So I hope you like it because there’s nothing I can do about it anyway – Mrs B has told me to stop changing it. Apparently it is disconcerting for visitors if it looks completely different each time they visit, and does little for building brand awareness! Although I’m still tempted to go for grey text instead of blue…

There are a couple of things I’ve added that I have great hopes for, so if you have a moment please take a look – for example, on most of the pages that talk about specific places in France I’ve added a form so visitors can leave comments. So if you know and love, say, Domme in the Dordogne (or anywhere else) you can leave a comment saying how great the teashop on the corner or the view from the belvedere really is. And lo and behold the comment will appear on the page.

Amazing, huh – it took me ages to install the software, although it should have only taken about 20 minutes.

I’m hoping lots of people submit comments, because it wil make the site much more interesting and useful for later visitors – if you have a favourite place in France please do let us have your comments (if you can’t find your favourite place, you can check if we’ve covered it yet by searching using the ‘search site’ feature on most pages – if we haven’t written about your favourite place yet let us know, or even better write about if for us…!).

Other changes I’ve made are exciting for me at least – I changed a lot of the gites listed to be on an automated XML update, for example, but these are less exciting for you.

One little thing we added which I like the idea of is a way to book a river cruise in France. We always stayed in gites when we used to visit France (and still do when we go away) but I like the idea of a river cruise – drifting through the Burgundy countryside or along the Canal du Midi sounds like a pretty groovy way to spend a week or two that I hope to try out one day.

Although I imagine that internet connections are not very common on boats. And as my family will tell you, a day without internet and I am like a heroine addict going through cold-turkey withdrawal.