Foreign Perspectives

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Travel accommodation listings sites are a peculiar beast and not handled very well by the search engines since it’s frequently the case that people are searching from one country for somewhere to stay in another one and that scenario just isn’t dealt with well by the algorithms.

How come? Well, basically they operate on the logical assumption that if you’re searching for something then it would make more sense for them to tell you about somewhere that you could find it locally. Clearly that’s a good thing if you’re looking for a plumber. It’s not nearly so good if you’re looking for somewhere for your next holiday.

The effect of this is that it’s rarely worthwhile for a European property to list on an American hosted listing service. That’s a bit of a shame as obviously there are Americans who go on vacation in Europe and vice versa.

Unfortunately, the only foolproof way around that is to mirror the sites on both sides of the Atlantic and we’ve been doing just that for that past few months. So far the effect has been largely to attract new rental properties in America but there’s a steady buildup of Americans using the sites hosted over there too.

So, having the first results of that little experiment behind me I’m now thinking of hosting a feeder site elsewhere. Australia seems the obvious choice although it will mean that I’ll need to set up Australia in the database. Oh well, another “to do” for the coming winter.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Selecting webhosting is always something of a gamble as it’s difficult to get a truly objective view of what a new host will be like.

There’s also the not inconsiderable problem that there are hundreds if not thousands of hosts out there, all with different hosting plans and prices. This at least you can do something about with services such as Web Hosting Choice which offers you a fairly comprehensive range of search options to find that “perfect” hosting service for you, or at least to thin out the choice somewhat.

Although they offer loads of options on the search, in reality you’d be crazy to attempt to use all of them. In fact, for most people perhaps the most significant ones to go for are probably:

• the cost. Don’t go too low: remember that you usually get what you pay for;
• the diskspace. Don’t go overboard with this as you can always upgrade your plan;
• the bandwidth. Don’t believe “unlimited” if you really do intend to use a massive amount of bandwidth;
• any special software that you require and in this context remember that even apparently “standard” software isn’t included in all plans (typically MySQL may be omitted from the very cheapest plans).

If you’re intending to host more than one website, add to that “addon domains” which saves a fortune by allowing you to host more than one domain in a single account.

Once you’ve reached a sensible number of potential hosting services, that’s the time to check up on their reputation.

Popularity: 13% [?]

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Sometimes it seems like everyone who’s ever designed a website needs to run up a blog to write about it.

Most of the time they tend to fizzle out though or change topics so that they end up being a general blog rather than sticking to their original niche. One design blog does seem to be making something of a point of avoiding that degeneration through collecting rather meaty articles (also a pleasant change from the normal design blogs which generally end up having very short articles) and that’s Stylish (a very popular word to use these days).

What do I mean by “meaty” articles. Well, consider their recent one about the user accounts in Vista. That one is written mainly for techies as it goes on for quite a bit about a facility that you shouldn’t be disabling although, to be fair, many people would like to disable it. Why shouldn’t you disable it? Well, all those annoying little messages that Vista pops up about such and such an application wanting to run are there so that when a malicious piece of software gets installed on your PC, it too will have to ask.

Similarly with a high information content yet perhaps not so accessible as it might be is their article on the spyware community. Yes, it’s useful information to have, but I’d have liked to have had a paragraph saying why it was useful information for you to have and on the whole that’s the problem with this blog: they have a whole lot of really useful information in it but could do with adding a paragraph to each post saying what the information is for.

Popularity: 20% [?]

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