7 rue René Fournets page complete

Studio Hyperset recently completed an intimate, boutique page for the townhouse in which co-founder Quimby Melton is living this Fall.

Located at 7 rue René Fournets in Pau, France, the owner of this rental property was having trouble making the page she’d built to advertise the house on the WWW rank well in Google search returns. As a result, the house wasn’t renting as consistently as she would have liked.

Scrapping the former site in favor of an attractive graphic layout coupled with

• keyword density,
• a sitemap,
• effectively composed <meta> tags,
• colophon bot links,
• and a robots.txt file,

the new site at http://www.pau-accommodation.com is poised to rank higher in search returns and thereby generate more traffic to the site. Once there, visitors should be intrigued by the graphics-heavy layout and Flash image rotator, both of which are meant to ensure the lovely home presents itself as attractively as possible to potential renters.

The bilingual site (in French and English) is also the first Studio Hyperset project to use a language other than English. This brought a number of design issues and questions to the forefront of the project: How can we be sure the French pages will be indexed in Google.fr? Should we set the French pages aside in a French directory or keep the French pages in the main-directory? How do we alert users to the presence of a French/English-language page and allow them to toggle back and forth between the two?

Settling for

• main-level pages named the same as their English-language counterparts (with “**_fr.htm” file names)
• with all French content, titles, <meta> data, links, and colophons,

users can toggle between the French and English versions of the pages using the French and UK/US flags in the top right of the main text areas of all pages. After some debate, it was decided that the flags would link to the pages on which they appear (i.e., allowing the visitor to toggle between the French and English versions of the contact form, for example) rather than “back” to the index/home pages of each language.

Finally, having found scant advice on the topic save this excellent article, Studio Hyperset hopes the <meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”fr”> meta tag included in the French pages will alert Google to index those pages in its French-language directory. We’re also trying to persuade the owner of the house to buy the .fr extension of her domain name as well as server space for the French version of the page in France.

Input, via blog comments or email to info@studiohyperset.com is always welcomed on how to better ensure this result.

And of course to French visitors of the site, nous sommes désolés que la langue première du site web est l’anglais. Pardonez-nous, s’il vous plaît.