Foreign Perspectives

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When you’re shopping around for car insurance, after a while it starts to sink in that all the sites are pretty much the same.

Most of them are but one car insurance site that is that little bit different is Car Insurance Rates. Sure, it’s got the standard quote engine that all sites seem to sport these days and the questions that they ask are pretty much the same as the other car insurance sites ask. Of course, they have to be as that’s what the insurance companies base their rates on.

However, where this site is different is that the quote engine seems almost an after-thought as the site is built along the lines of a general insurance advice site. For example, they tell you which cars are the most commonly stolen (don’t buy a Honda Civic if you want to avoid that!). Which are the most difficult to insure: a list that’s dominated by imports as you’d expect but not in the sequence that I would have put them in. Naturally, the counterpart to that list is those that are easiest to insure which has all the traditional domestic autos in it. All that information is obviously available to the insurance companies but this is the first site I’ve come across which collects it together for you.

It doesn’t just give rundowns on the car but provides more general advice as to how to get the lowest insurance and so on.

Worth looking at for the advice and guidance that they have on the site and you might even end up buying your insurance through them too!

Popularity: 18% [?]

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We had quite a busy weekend pretty much filled with shuffling the websites around which is always a depressing thing to be doing as you spend hours moving things and at the end you’re hoping that it all looks the same as it did to begin with.

First off was the establishment of our foothold in America which currently consists mainly of our French vacation listings site, our French B&B site, our global accommodation site and our global travel guide. That’s our initial collection and we’re hoping that over the next few months the traffic on those will start to catch up with that on their Europe counterparts.

Next was an upgrade to the new version of the listings which gives the property owners a little six page website instead of the previous single page version. That’s phase one of a more significant upgrade which’ll let us offer to build custom websites for vacation properties.

And finally, now that we’ve a proper American hosting service it was the turn of a couple of blogs to head west as their content is more appropriate for an American audience.

Where does all this stuff live now? Well, to give us a bit of contingency we’re using Lunarpages for most of the sites but have kept 3ix for one site as a backup in that one thing that was very clear when we read the various reviews of sites was that it was always prudent to retain a second hosting service. For that purpose, 3ix seems ideal in that their base plan is all of $12 per year which is comparable to the monthly charge of some services and frankly seems the ideal service if you’ve only got one site and don’t mind that it’s hosted in America.

That’s us basically settled down now though I see that Wordpress have yet another new version out so we’ll be moving onto that with the various blogs over the next few weeks or so (no big rush though).

Popularity: 31% [?]

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If you’ve ever been left wondering if you really needed the specific insurance that you were sold, then FinanceGenius could be the site that you’ve always thought should be somewhere.

Basically what they do is collect together a series of short guides as to what the various insurance contracts actually mean in reasonably clear terms (it seems to be impossible for insurance ever to be entirely 100% clear). For example, their little articles on Automobile Extende Warranty gives you a rundown on what you can expect from new car warranties, extended warranties and insurance and gives you some pointers as to where you can save money and some of the loopholes in each of these.

It’s not 100% exhaustive on the options but then that would be pretty much impossible for a general site.

Popularity: 31% [?]

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