Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

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.

OK, so you’ve got a lovely B&B, brilliant location and beautifully decorated but what about attracting some guests?

That’s usually the step that fells most B&B owners as they generally get into the business by accident, figuring that if they have a lovely place then loads of people will come to stay.

Unfortunately, it rarely works like that and before long they start looking around for places to advertise this “heaven on earth” that they’ve created. Sadly, some of the owners leave that step far too late: you should get going on your marketing efforts as early as possible, even if it means that you are advertising the place before it’s ready and need to add “ready next Easter” or whatever.

As usual, we’re getting going on our own marketing for the new year fairly soon. In addition to the annual upgrade of our family of listings sites (OurInns) we’re rolling out two new initiatives in that area: Whole Earth Guide already and soon Inns4U. All are free listings sites so if you have a B&B or self-catering (vacation rental) place now’s a good time to add yourself here.

Once we get about half-way through October, our Winter development programme usually starts to get into its stride.

For this year, we have a whole host of things on the to-do list:

1. A general tidy-up of the original version of the inns family of sites. First-off on this front is a major spring-clean of the UK listings before we start firing our marketing e-mails off. We’ve recently added the Inns4U domain which may take over as the primary domain for these sites although it’ll likely be a very gradual changeover.
2. The upgrade of the new-generation sites over at OurBedAndBreakfasts.com will be continuing in tandem with the expansion of our Whole Earth Guide.
3. The Whole Earth Guide will be expanding quite rapidly, initially concentrating on the areas already covered by the inns listings. Once we get enough content onto Whole Earth, we’re planning on incorporating content from it into the other listings sites which should help the ranking of those too.
4. More blogs will be coming onstream over the next few months. We’ve changed over to Cultured Views and have been working on both An Age of Magic and On a Postcard on and off over the Summer.

Somehow I think that’ll keep us pretty busy this side of Christmas!

I find that after a while the focus of our blogs tends to drift off from the original idea and so, sometimes, it’s useful to change the domain name to reflect the new focus of the topics in it.

So far, that’s resulted in this particular blog living in three different guises over the course of almost four years. Mark one wasn’t a blog per se in that it was basically a mailing list that I used to keep everyone back home up to date on what we were getting up to. A couple of years later, when the mailing list became a bit unmanageable it moved into its original blog format although the content remained pretty much the same. Then last year we thought that it was time to revitalise the whole thing and put it on the Foreign Perspectives domain.

Now, its Wendy’s turn. To begin with she kicked off her blog on her own domain but didn’t really get into it for the first few months. She has now though and usually has three or four posts a day before you even count sponsored ones. Anyway, it was time to get it onto a proper domain which is Cultured Views. Of course, the snag now is that we have loads of places that we need to tell about that change of domain and there’s the issue of seeing about getting the pagerank moved over too.

Since she has a proper domain now, ’tis time to think about promoting it and we’re hoping to get going on that over the next couple of days.

Interestingly, one of our most successful website launches is our very new Whole Earth Guide. For reasons which totally escape me, our article on opening a bank account in America has proved to be an immediate success for the site and consequently we’ll be extending the expat banking section of the site over the coming months.