Last night I happened across the Georgetown Inn in Washington D.C. It’s acclaimed to be one of the most recognizable establishments in D.C. and has been so for the more than 40 years. One look at their web page and your transported back to colonial times when things were a lot simpler. It’s conveniently located on Wisconsin Avenue within a couple miles of the Capitol, White House, National Mall and most other major monuments.

The obligatory Flash photo gallery infuses you with stately images of local monuments, the hotel itself and the Mall. I like how the images fade from black and white to color almost as a representation of changing from the past to the present. The site is laid out well overall with nice clean lines and soothing colors. The site like the hotel gives you a air of sophistication like you’d be a better, higher class of person just by walking through their doors.

A quick glance at their menu reveals a bit of a split personality. There appears to be two main menu’s with a possible third. This is a bit distracting, but manageable. Fairly quickly I find a guest room link that takes me to a nice view of the different room types, however I don’t readily see rates. This is assuaged a bit by the ad for $119 summer rates. I know right away if it fits in my budget. Next I look for the hotel photo gallery and I wasn’t disappointed to see a hotel photo tour on the menu.

Rather disappointingly I look at the code behind this properly adorned site and I see a raft of deprecated code. There is no semantic markup or tableless design, only old bloated code. Their search engine optimization is nowhere to be found as there isn’t a single header in the main page. There’s so much potential here for improvement in the usability, accessibility and search engine ranking of the site. They just renovated their 96, European-style accommodations, too bad some of that didn’t go to improving their web site as well.

- 15 HTML errors
- 13 CSS errors.
-Failed accessibility test

Overall I would give the site an B+ for form and a C function.

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2. Beaver Creek Resort, Colorado
3. The Grand America Hotel
4. Views from the Viking are Vivacious
5. Emerald Lake Lodge, Another Gem in the Crown

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Accessibility, CSS, Design, HTML, Hotels, Reviews, SEO, Standards, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.