Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

Wendy’s very keen on family history but we’ve only just got around to registering a domain for her to put her researches on.

You can look forward to seeing a constant stream of information on the Hamilton’s at Hamilton Family History which is just live as of today though already with its first post.

Over the coming Winter, she’s planning on putting the result of her researches over the years onto the site.

Whatever size your development team is, there’s always an advantage to be had if you can standardise on a common platform and maximise the reuse of any code that’s been written.

It’s obvious really yet you see many people throwing up totally different websites solely for the purpose of being different and nothing else. Yet, look at what the big boys are doing. You’ll have seen untold numbers of very similar hotel reservation sites for the simple reason that there are perhaps a dozen major players out there and they offer what amounts to a franchise to their data via easily customiseable templates which range from the simple click-through banners that you see everywhere to sites that appear pretty much unique, yet aren’t.

On a very small scale, I’ve been busy building on the database of property listings that I’ve built up over the last few years and running up variations on that. Lately, I’ve gone one step further and started using the database structure and front-end template to hold our growing Whole Earth Guide which gives me totally different content yet displayed within the framework of our new-generation sites.

The other plus point of all this is that with a common platform, it’s often the case that a new application running on that platform will require a tiny enhancement which thereby appears across all systems using that platform. For instance, we now have a major improvement in the menu structure on the new-generation sites courtesy of Whole Earth developments (see Inns4U).

It’s surprising just how much mileage you can get out of a database driven website template.

Our B&B and self-catering listings sites have been held on the database for around two years now and we’ve been able to run up several new variants of them since, each taking just a few weeks to get operational from the time of the original concept.

Of these, our new-generation template is proving to be the most flexible. We’re still adding enhancements to it but already we’ve been able to launch our Whole Earth Guide based on in and we’ve been working on yet another variation, Inns4U, which for the first time includes all our properties rather than separating them out into B&B and vacation rentals and thereby creates a website with a much larger footprint than the others.

Tidying up Inns4U will probably keep us out of trouble for the rest of October and perhaps into November though we’re also plugging away with the new-ish blogs at An Age of Magic and On a Postcard of course.

Jame’s bed has finally given up the ghost so we’re hoping to have a look for a new one today.

In France, bedding like all furniture can be very expensive and if you see something at a sensible price, it’s often just poor quality. This, of course, makes the search that much more difficult.

There’s also the not inconsiderable problem of the size of the beds. As anyone who has been on holiday in France will know, the beds are smaller than the norm in other countries. Still, we’ll not need to worry too much about the size of the bed we get for James for a while.

Anyway, I suspect that we’ll need to head off to IKEA at some stage although that brings with it the problem of how to actually get the bed back here.

Good, yet affordable, health insurance is something that we all want but it’s something that’s not always easy to find.

In America, one way to reduce the costs considerably is to insure via an HMO since they negotiate lower prices and seek out lower cost alternative treatments thereby making their own running costs much lower and allowing them to pass these savings on to you and your family.

For instance, you can apply via the Kaiser Permanente online application to the Kaiser insurance company which is the leading HMO in the America and offers cover in most states. It’s important that they’re the leading one as their increased buying power relative to the others will help ensure that their charges are lower too.