"Every little deal is a big deal."
Fishes Interview #9 with Alan D Walker, creator & master of Caribbeanrental, the Caribbean's Premier Vacation Rental Portal
about the father's business - Fishes Interviews
Candid interviews with web site builders & designers "A series of interviews with online shop owners, artists, musicians and business owners, all are celebrities in my book. Level of web design, W3C Validation or CSS and HTML expertise is not as important as their hopes, dreams, struggles and accomplishments. "
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Welcome to the Fishes Candid Interviews | design by atfb, web design and custom graphics, photograph restoration, photograph enhancement and logo creation.
QUESTION: I hope you are familiar with the fish image and the history, if you would identify yourself with a fish in the image and tell us why you did so.
Answer: I certainly am, Sharron. I'm that one in the bottom left hand corner. A small fish in a big pond, but swimming blithely onwards, stress free and not worrying about all the excitement going on around him. lol, so in fact you are avoiding becoming "em-broiled" and eaten for dinner?
QUESTION: Alan, what do you do in "real life". Who is Alan D Walker?
Answer: "Real life"? But this is real life! In other spheres of my real life, though, I'm a husband and father, and a management consultant. I guess Alan D Walker is just the sum total of half-a-lifetime's varied activities and experiences.
QUESTION: Where are you located?
Answer: I'm in the UK, quite near to London.
QUESTION: What site domains or subdomains constitute your site(s)?
Answer: My main site is http://www.caribbeanrental.com. My first "proper" site was done for my wife's opera agency business, about three years ago: http://www.hayeswalker.co.uk. There are also a couple of others knocking around the internet - but I won't bore you with those!
QUESTION: What prompted you to build your web site (s)?
Answer: My wife and I travelled in the Caribbean, and realised how different the various islands are from each other. Yet, though there are loads of websites specialising in particular islands, it was very hard to gain a quick flavour of multiple islands in one place. So I decided to start the site we would have liked to have seen. But being from a business background, I also wanted the site to at least pay for itself (and recoup what we paid for the domain name - see below). So the idea of a site providing both information and paid advertising was born.
QUESTION: How did you settle on your domain name (s)? How long has your site been online?
Answer: Given the thinking above, I was going to call it something like caribbeanvillarental.co.uk. But a bit of research showed that other areas of the rental market are less well served than the villa rental sector. And .com domains look more "global" than country specific domains. So I really needed "caribbeanrental.com". But that was already owned by someone else, so I had to buy it from him! The site has had useful content on it for about a year now.
QUESTION: Alan have you ever asked a "dumb" question concerning website design or implementation? What was it? Was it easily resolved?
Answer: Well all my questions were dumb to begin with. Especially the first time I hand coded a page from scratch. But a colleague took pity on me and showed me the ropes. I don't think I've ever posted a completely dumb question online (stand by for people to dredge up questions I've long forgotten about!) as most dumb questions have already been asked by other people. The internet is a wonderful resource for researching answers to dumb questions without having to admit you're asking.
QUESTION: Do you feel your site is finished or do you still have grander goals? Elaboration is expected.
Answer: Definitely not finished. There are several islands with no coverage at all so far, and that's even before I start to expand the site from the current concept. Perhaps one day I will semi-retire, and the site will mutate into a full travel agency?
QUESTION: Your site http://www.caribbeanrental.com is quite obviously a Caribbean vacation destination site. Are you yourself a traveler?
Answer: Well, as I mentioned, the site was triggered by travel to the Caribbean. But yes, I have travelled more broadly than that, including Australia, Canada, the Gambia, Hong Kong, Egypt, India, Malaysia, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and much of the US. Of all the places I've been to, though, it's the Caribbean that draws me back again and again.
QUESTION: Designing a site is often a daunting experience. Did you plan in advance the look and navigation schemes? The color scheme is on your site is quite nice. Was that a personal choice?
Answer: "Quite nice?". From design guru Sharron I take that as a major compliment!! I'll have to be honest, though, and say that the basic look was provided by a template that I amended to meet my particular needs. As for the colour scheme, so many Caribbean sites are done in bright Rastafarian colours (SHARRON'S NOTE: According to this bbc article, Rastafarian colours are red, green and gold and sometimes black.) , and I wanted a slightly different, more relaxed, mood. The small photo on the home page is one of my own that I'm particularly fond of, so I designed the colour scheme around that. The navigation structure was designed right at the beginning, to ensure I could deliver everything I wanted to without too much drill-down.
QUESTION: Alan, what was your most profound moment as it relates to your web site (s)? And if you can, what was the most disastrous moment?
Answer: I'm not sure "profound" is the right word, but the most exciting moments were the first time someone reached the site via a search engine, and the first time someone decided the site was worth paying to advertise on. These twin events symbolised the two objectives I set out above: providing useful content and bringing in income. Most disastrous moment? Probably that humiliating moment when a certain Mr Mark Jensen (trackerm to Statcounter Forum members) pointed out that my meta tags were prime examples of heinous "keyword stuffing"! Ouch!!
QUESTION: How do you balance your web building time and your personal life? Do you feel you balance it well?
Answer: Hmmm... let me go check with my wife! Actually, it's not too difficult. The website is a long term project, so can afford to come pretty low down in the pecking order. If I can spend a couple of hours a week on it, I'm a happy man.
QUESTION: My personal dream vacation is Saint John's Bay , a US Virgin Island destination? I've heard that vacationers can actually camp on that island. Do you have plans to expand your site destinations and information to cater to the "wilder" non conventional rental visitors?
Answer: Lovely! Destination expansion - definitely. I want to cover every Caribbean island that is populated. And other types of rental? Again yes. Once I have good coverage of villas, cars, boats and apartments on every island, I'll then expand to additional rental categories.
QUESTION: Alan, what are your dreams and aspirations? They don't have to relate to your website.
Answer: A happy and contented old age. Perhaps in the Caribbean, running a small online travel agency.....
QUESTION: What would you say was the most difficult part of building your site (s)? What would you say proved the simplest?
Answer: With hindsight, the simplest part was designing a structure that works. The hardest part, by far, is developing decent, useful, content.
QUESTION: How do you feel about following the W3C validation recommendations?
Answer: They are clearly "a good thing" as they enable multiple browsers to view your content as you mean it to be viewed. But, in my view, they should be a little clearer as to the relative importance of each "error". Telling me a page has 92 errors isn't very helpful if the page does, in fact, display perfectly correctly in all the main browsers, and many of the 92 are actually very minor. And I don't subscribe to the view that all errors, however minor, adversely affect search ranking. As of today, Google's home page continues to show 43 errors, and it hardly has any content. So Google can't possibly think it highly important, can it? All that having been said, when I recently created a simple one page site and found it did validate, I was very happy to include the little W3C logo proudly declaring the fact!
QUESTION: How much attention do you feel you pay to web standards and accessibility issues?
Answer: I try to comply whenever the effort to do so is both proportionate and useful. So, for example, I'll worry about Alt tags for photographic images, but not for little button graphics that have a text hyperlink right next to them anyway. It seems strange to me, though, to be told to accommodate the small percentage of, for example, partially-sighted people who may want to view my site, when I'm allowed to completely ignore the millions of non-English speakers who might want to look at it. By providing my site in English only, I am presumably discriminating against a much larger number of people than the partially-sighted ones I may or may not be accommodating. So I don't really understand the logic.
QUESTION: I do believe that you utilize Serif's software to build and maintain your site. They've an upgrade coming soon, one that is being promoted as being better equipped to produce cleaner more compliant code. Are you considering using this new update and why?
Answer: How very topical. I have just bought the Serif WebPlus 10 upgrade and am experimenting with it this weekend. The main reason I bought the upgrade was because of some enhanced functionality I wanted (specifically, the ability to specify Header tags). But I'd certainly be delighted if the code it generates does in fact validate better. As it happens, I've just tried re-generating my home page with the upgraded software, and the number of W3C errors has actually gone up from 92 to 98. But this is perhaps because the page was originally written in an earlier version of the software. Maybe all-new pages will fare better!
QUESTION: If you had one bit of advice or a tidbit of knowledge to impart, what would it be?
Answer: Creating a website is a labour of love. It doesn't all have to be finished in one weekend.
QUESTION: If you could post two links to websites, that you consider to be outstanding sites what would they be? They need not be outstanding due to validation, css or web standards just outstanding in that they are interesting, helpful and or contribute to the overall betterment of the web wide world.
Answer: Well, frustrating as Google can be at times, I have to nominate google.com as one site. As for the other, I think I'd probably go for bbc.com as it has loads of varied content and provides a constantly-updated window onto the world.
QUESTION: Alan if you could build a web site for the pure pleasure of it, what would it be about?
Answer: The Caribbean!
QUESTION: I've asked other's and would like to ask you, what is your natural born talent (s)? Would you agree that everyone has them?
Answer: Everyone has talents of one sort or another. I've never met anyone who's below average at everything. I suppose my natural born talent is for learning and exploring new things. This has led me to a life I find rich in variety and experience.
QUESTION: This interview has been a wee bit difficult. lol, I can't help but feel I've missed asking an pertinent and obvious question. Do you have any idea what it might have been?
Answer: I think the only question I have been half expecting, but that hasn't been asked, is: "Why do you use Serif to create your website rather than doing it properly?". This is certainly an issue that some people feel strongly about. My answer is that it's all about goals and objectives. My goal is to create a content-rich site, not to become an expert hand-crafter of code. I know I'm capable of becoming a hand-crafter (and I've even done it, on a small scale, in the past) but that's not something I feel I need to do if WYSIWYG software can get me a pretty good alternative more quickly. That said, I am full of admiration for those who build their sites from scratch. Doing so successfully is an achievement in its own right - just not one that's high on my list of priorities right now.
QUESTION: Any parting remarks you'd like to make?
Answer: Just to say thank you for the opportunity to step back and think about why I bother with a website. If ever I hit one of those "bored and frustrated" moments, I'll look up your site and remind myself why I'm doing it. Thanks Sharron!
Alan you have done a marvelous job! Thanks.
In reference to my not asking you, "Why do you use Serif to create your website rather than doing it properly?". I had made the decision that the Fishes Interviews are meant to encourage and promote web builders and designers, as well as the sites they are proud of! It matters not their level of supposed "expertise". I also avoid political and religious questions,......for good reason! lol
