The Cliff at Bude website redesign

The Cliff at Bude is a medium-sized, family friendly hotel in Cornwall. In fact it's owned by some friends of mine. Basically, I look after their website and they put me up in a room from time to time! I don't know who has the best of that deal but it's incumbent on me to redesign their website.

The latest redesign of the hotel site went live yesterday. It's a more modern layout, compared with the previous 6-7 year old version, that attempts to highlight the hotel and the fantastic scenery in Bude. In the new version, I have used a few CSS3 properties to give drop shadows and rounded corners on some elements. Yes, yes, not another rounded corner, you may say. However, I think they do add something in many designs.

I'm pretty happy with the new design and I rushed to view it on Internet Explorer 9 when I upgraded the other day. Disappointingly, the 12px (equivalent) Arial font that is used in some areas of the website looks slightly worse in IE9 than other browsers on my system. Perhaps it's my system/screen or something but I will need to assess in different browsers on other PCs. I'm surprised that a common font-size and Arial font is not as legible as it could be.

Despite this text foible, overall I'm very pleased with how the site turned out.

Update: I have assessed other sizes/fonts and it may be that I change the font-size for some elements from 12px to 13px – or change the font completely – in a few weeks. Let's get some feedback first though.