Foreign Perspectives

I managed to get the various listings sites fully integrated in their new home just in time as I’ve just had a couple of requests for upgrades to the sites.

Back when they were all in separate places, the small amendment that I did this morning to add click-throughs on all the photos of properties would have meant several hours of work checking that I’d applied the amendments properly in each of the separate sites. This morning just one file needed to be amended and it was done across all of the sites at a stroke.

The next one up is more of a task though and it’s one that I’ve been mulling over for quite a while. Essentially it’s adding the ability for each property to specify the facilities that they provide for the guests. Sounds simple but the list of facilities is rather long by the time you consider that in addition to the pool, there’s things like flatscreen TVs, DVD players, hifi systems, saunas, steam rooms: you name it and somebody is sure to have it. Not only that, but somebody else is likely to have something that you’ve not even heard of never mind considered adding it to the potential list of facilities.

Now I could do it in the very fixed way that a lot of sites go for but that seems to be asking for trouble in the long run. Much better, in principle, to have a popup list I think and that’s easy enough. What I’ve not thought about yet is actually storing the information in the database nor for that matter how the owners might go about entering it. Still, ’tis time to do that bit of thinking I suspect before the list of little requests gets too long.