Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

Testing websites can be quite difficult once you go beyond the simple online brochure type of website.

For one thing, unlike most “normal” computer applications, you have untold millions of untrained people who can access your site and therefore you need to make sure that you try equally stupid things along the way of your testing as they are sure to do in “real life”. Clearly internet connections go down for instance and you need to allow for that, but what about the speed of their connections? One or two sites that I’ve tried out lately have consistently timed out on me no matter what I’ve done because my connection just isn’t anything like the speed that the writers of the site assumed that it would be.

Once you get into databases it’s a whole different ballgame too. For one thing, you always need to be able to let a number of people update your database simultaneously which in itself requires a different style of programming than that which is sometimes taught in the schools. What’ll work on a closed corporate network isn’t necessarily acceptable on an open Internet one.

Even after your site is up for a while, you should make a point of trying it out now and again. Actually looking it as your customers will see it. Remember they don’t necessarily have the 25″ widescreen monitor that you have and, even today, are more than likely using resolutions of 1000×800 or less. Watch the fonts you use too as many that you get with your computer aren’t available via the Internet; newer computers don’t always support the fonts on the older ones either.

Although we’re now well into the marketing season for B&B and self-catering listings sites, the usual wave of marketing e-mails from such places is quite noticeable in its absence this year.

Last year was a little unusual to be fair as maisoneurope.com had a new owner and he was firing out e-mails like there was no tomorrow several times a month at least and sometimes several times per week. This year, that particular factor is absent for the moment though presumably he’ll be getting going again in the not too distant future provided he’s not gone bust on the adwords campaigns that he was running. Whether he was successful at it or not remains to be seen but the site has never yet come up on ordinary searches that I’ve done myself so I’m a bit doubtful. Still, perhaps the adwords to sell the properties combined with the subscription income from them is enough to keep things ticking along nicely.

This year, all that’s appeared sporadically has been an e-mail from frenchentree.com who are expanding their site with rental listings. The pricing doesn’t really work for B&B so I’ve not bothered with them as yet but if their six months free offer is still around in February I’ll probably take them up on it.

Our own sites don’t have offers as such in that they’re free all the time which has caused us problems in roping in new entries for the crazy reason that people figure that if it’s free it doesn’t have any worth. Consequently, we added the option of paying us £29 per year which by placing a value on the listings meant that we started to pull in more people than before.

Of course, that begs the question: if I raised the notional price to, say, £129 would that bring even more people in?

Indeed, if I listed it as a six months free offer would I pull in really big numbers of new entries?

I’m toying with the idea of doing something along these lines on one of our new-generation sites – either Inns4u or perhaps, when I get around to updating it, Our French Chateau (which gets a surprising number of hits even now).

Marketing a B&B is usually a Winter-time activity as you’re just too busy to do much about it during the Summer season when you’re full with guests.

So, as we edge out of the shoulder-season (which can be quite busy), we’re edging into the marketing season and therefore the arrival of e-mails offering to advertise your B&B and bring you thousands of bookings if only you’ll pay a few hundred pounds to list your place.

Last year, I thought I’d have a go at e-mail marketing for the listings sites that I run and was very surprised at the initial reactions that I got. Although the sites are free to list, or rather because they are free to list, several people were very suspicious about them in their replies to my e-mails. So, I had a think about this and added a charging option which interestingly helped me pull in a lot more entries than when it was totally free!

Funnily enough, only one person has ever paid for a subscription to the site yet it seems necessary to have a charge sitting there so that people give their free listing a value ie they are saving £29 per year. The value is even better this year though as I now offer to pay those listed for any recommendations that come via them.

Anyway, I’ve fired off my first batch of e-mails to B&Bs in Scotland last night and it’s already pulled in a dozen or so new entries which is pretty good going for the first day and, all being well, they’ll be trickling in over the rest of the week.

When Wendy started off her blog we just used the domain wendyreid.org for it as we already had that registered.

That was back in February but by the Summer she was well into writing paid posts and it seemed like a good idea to a) be using a dotcom domain and b) using one that was related to the blog content too.

Why the dotcom? That’s because a number of the paid post opportunities specify that you have a dotcom and therefore moving to one would increase the number available to her. Also, and related to that, for reasons that are far from clear a dotcom is better than a dotorg in terms of search engine positioning (which is why we’re also in the process of moving Our Inns to Inns4U).

Having the blog name related to the content is just a sensible thing anyway but it also helps for those paid posting sites where the advertiser chooses the blog.

Anyway, we registered Cultured Views and aliased it with the existing wendyreid.org domain so you can access the content by using either domain. Then we started telling the various sites that she’s signed up with.

No problem ’til we did PayPerPost. When we did that, the number of available opportunities dropped like a stone. Although nothing had really changed about the blog, they took the current pagerank of the new domain and used that to filter the opportunities. Naturally, that was PR0 therefore there were next to none available. So we asked them to change it back ’til we managed to transfer the pagerank over.

Ironically, just about the same time as the pagerank transferred over, somebody else in ppp noticed that the blog didn’t match the domain and changed it back. Well, tried to because they didn’t do it properly and Wendy’s not been able to post anything with them for days.

Finally, they replied to her support ticket and the guy said he’d changed everything including the URLs quoted in the past…. to culturedreviews.com. So she still can’t post anything! Perhaps they’ll get it 100% this time around.

Sony is one company that continually plows its own furrow in terms of standards and had done so for many years.

All through the era of the VHS-C standard, they kept producing their own Hi-8 camcorders and throughout the price of the corresponding tapes remained higher than the equivalent VHS-C tapes. Now, in those days they could argue that the Hi-8 tapes were better quality but that doesn’t apply in the digital era.

They continue to stick with the memory stick on their cameras when everyone else has mainly gone down the SD route. It’s certainly not the case that the memory stick memory is “better” in some ways than the SD cards yet the price is around three to four times! Yes, for what you’ll pay for a 1GB memory stick you’ll get 4GB worth of SD cards.