Foreign Perspectives

Archive for June, 2008

Much as we try to keep a broad focus in the areas of travel & finance here I’m sure that you find that it wanders quite a bit. Therefore what I’m planning on doing is to split it in two with ForeignPerspectives retaining all the travel postings and another blog picking up the financial ones that don’t also fall under the travel/expat headings.

Now, the question is: what to call the new blog? I’d have quite liked FinancialPerspectives.com but unfortunately some plonker has already registered that for one of the junk sites that you seem to get under every decent name these days. Anyway, I’ve been hunting around and still haven’t found anything that seems “just right”.

You’d think that when they were placing an advert for their holiday property they’d at least read what country it was in, wouldn’t you?

Surprisingly, an increasing number of people these days don’t seem to read anything before they click. For example, this morning I’d a submission to our holiday listings site for a property. Snag was that it was listed as a “for sale” property rather than a holiday one, as being in the French language when it was in English and as not being in France. It seems doubtful that they actually read what they were typing for that one.

To get the process as clean as possible, the main input form for the properties contains information about what should be in every section and yet even there it’s frequently ignored. For instance, whilst we’ve a section that’s for use in sending comments or additional information to me and isn’t published, I very often find that it contains essential information about the property.

Maybe now you’ll understand why some of the large listings sites have adverts that are in very dodgy English!

One of the things that I’d not really allowed for when I started the listings sites was that people would want to drop their listing.

For a normal site that charges a lot of cash each year you’d expect that people wouldn’t always renew, but when I started the site was completely free so why would anyone drop their listing? Whilst only one has dropped off in the sense of not wanting their listing at all, quite a number have dropped out through having either sold their property or simply stopped offering holiday accommodation.

This year the turnover is so high that I’m finally getting around to implementing a facility for people to suspend their listing themselves and I’ve also started to send out verification e-mails to check that those on the site are still in the business.

For a variety of reasons I ended up learning Spanish rather than German years ago with the effect that it’s only now that I’m getting around to starting on the German.

As expected, it’s easier to pick up than either French or Spanish were in that since English is also a Germanic language then various aspects of it are a good deal similar to English than the corresponding constructs in French and Spanish. The overall effect of that plus me already having two foreign languages behind me is that I’m progressing through the course at quite a pace and can even say some relatively sensible things in German whereas it was quite a while before I got to the same point in the other languages.

One “problem” that I’m having is that the Rosetta Stone course that I’m following seems “too easy” in that you pick up the language without really trying that hard. Whether that’ll remain the case as I get further into it remains to be seen though!

One of the things that I’ve been looking at over the last couple of days is how I present the affiliate properties on the holiday listings sites and particularly on the new generation versions of them.

What I’d been doing was listing 5 properties from my own site along with 5 from theirs. That worked out fine in areas where the balance between my properties and theirs was more or less equal. So, for example, if I had three properties in an area and they’d 4 or 5 all the properties ended up on one page.

Where it didn’t work out so well was where they’d a lot more properties than I had. For instance, if I had five and they’d 500 then what happened was that one page was generated with my five plus five of theirs. Well, what I did a week ago was to increase the limit to 100 per page for them which created a whole bunch more pages on the site of course. Although it did appear to increase the site hits considerably (essentially in proportion to the new properties), it meant that the pages themselves took ages to load.

So, over the last few days I’ve made what’s really quite a very minor change so that their properties are divided up amongst as many pages as required to keep to the normal page size but simultaneously listing all of their properties in each of the areas. Net effect is that I’ve several hundred properties listed in some areas where previously I had at best a handful.

These changes generally take about a week for google to pick up so, all being well, early next week I’ll be seeing a bit of a jump in the hits across the board as that change created a few thousand extra pages across the site.