Ashford Castle

http://www.ashford.ie/

Intended audience

• potential castle guests
• potential castle employees

Usefulness of content
The content is very useful for potential guests. It includes:

• lots of gorgeous pictures of the castle
• packages and last-minute offers
• a tool to view rates and make reservations
• information regarding castle amenities and how to get there
• video tours of the castle (really neat if you've got the bandwidth)

The only other information I would need as a potential consumer are user reviews. For this reason, I'd probably log on to another site and look for that. I wouldn't expect the web site to publish any negative or even balanced reviews towards its own product.

Consistency of design

• Everything is big. The dimensions of the site are relatively wide, which indicates that they're targeting customers with larger monitors. The videos demand higher bandwidth, which again targets more affluent customers.
• The royal blue and gold color scheme is very elegant, and is used consistently.
• The pictures are all gorgeous and have a similar feel about them. This could not have been easy because there are so many of them, and they feature everything from aerial shots, snow-covered seasonal shots, photos of certain dishes, to photos of people. Everything in the photos seems infused with light, and gives the illusion that this is the natural state of this magical place.

Ease of navigation

• A minor quibble is that the main navigation bar shifts above or below a large picture depending upon the subtopic which is being featured.
• The secondary navigation bar on the left hand side of the screen exists only for certain topics. Otherwise, a row of thumbnails is used as a secondary navigation device. After clicking on a few links, it's easy to forget how you got there.
• There are no breadcrumbs to help guide you.
• However, the back button on the browser works on all the pages that I tested, and that helps a lot.
• The reservation tool has tabs which clearly indicate the steps involved in making a reservation, which is very helpful from an e-commerce perspective.