WaltYSIWYG

Matt is selling his narrowboat Walt, and he's produced a wonderfully detailed website describing it. 

I saw the sign in the window when passing through Carthagena Lock, near Broxbourne, and the web address aroused my curiosity.  So I looked it up.

www.narrowboatwalt.co.uk is no scruffy semi-literate small ad, it's a wonderfully detailed walk-through.  Matt's used a free website courtesy of Microsoft Office Live Small Business, and while it won't win prizes for website design, that's not what's needed. 

It simply lists everything - in dogged Sheadian detail - that you get for your £63k (no offers, he's in no hurry), from the superb lockside mooring right down to the underwater camera to see what's fouling the propellor (seriously). 

And he guarantees full tanks of everything on handover.  And he tells you why he's selling it, kosher reasons.  Walt you see is Walt you get.  With detail like this, who needs a broker?

Well, obviously Matt does, because he also advertised it in Canal Boat magazine, and despite all the splendid work Matt's put in, the website doesn't appear in Google.   It makes a small appearance in Microsoft's own Live Search, but I wonder if these 'Microsoft Live' websites are excluded from Google's index?

If so, this is a major reason for avoiding Microsoft Live websites and using a mainstream blog to sell your boat.   Or try advertising on Apollo Duck - because the Duck's ads are indexed superbly by search engines.

(Incidentally, a great example of a boat for sale via a blog - indexed by Google - is Papillon.  Although that boat sold a year ago, the vendors left the blog online as a wonderful example to others.)

Matt's named his boat after his grandfather (all good boats are named after grandparents, arf arf) but another interesting point is that he always refers to the boat as 'he', not 'she'.   I can understand that - I usually call Granny 'it'. 

Comments

[Steve Parkin]

We have always refered to our boat Albert as "she" since all boats are female.

It isn't a grandparents name, because she came 2nd hand and we don't like changing boat names. We also really like good old-fashioned simple names.

I think Albert would get upset if we called her "it"!

[Paul Savage]

I would hope that one tank isn't full when he sells the boat, in fact one tank shoudl be empty and clean!!

Very true about naming boats after grandparents. Mine is called Adreva, and is named after my Grandmother Eva. It was always a dream of hers (as well as ours) that we would one day own a boat. Sadly she never lived to see and enjoy it with us.
Adreva stands for A DReam for EVA