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.

Wendy’s been looking through a whole lot of blogs this afternoon and, frankly, the quality of writing that she’s seen has been pretty dismal.

Now, I can accept that many bloggers are just scribbling down their thoughts and, yes, there will be spelling mistakes and no doubt gramatical errors that creep in now and again. Fair enough, but she’s been looking, by and large, at blogs that take sponsored posts and it’s a very poor level of writing from what are professional writers.

Yes, you count as a professional writer if you’re writing sponsored posts. You’re getting paid to write, aren’t you?

I’ll not single out any in particular but some of the writing is so bad that it amazes me that the advertisers actually pay for it. There’s people out there saying things like “i done this” when it should be “I did that” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Frankly, I’d expect better work from a 12 year old. In fact, one of the better written blogs is written by a 14 year old so it’s not impossible to write decent stuff.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to write on high brow topics every post. It’s nothing at all to do with the content. What needs improving in a major way is the spelling and grammar used.

Some of the pay per post outlets are already hinting that quality checks are coming: it’s going to be better to improve your quality of writing before they arrive because many of the bloggers out there are going to find that their blog is totally shunned by advertisers if it’s tagged as being one that consistently falls down on the spelling and grammar.

If you find that your current efforts are the best you can do at the moment and you know they’re not good enough, then do something about it. Take a course to improve your English. If you’re taking sponsored posts it would probably even be a tax deductible expense and, in some countries, you can get free or subsidised courses if your English isn’t good enough.

But make no mistake about it: quality standards will come at some point and it’s better to be prepared for that in advance.

Now and again it’s always useful to review the websites that you’ve collected over the previous year and consider if they can be integrated.

We spent today doing that with our own collection of sites which are mainly in the accommodation listings field and found that we could, with relatively little effort, integrate our UK listings sites with our global offering. Why bother though? Well, now that both are running on the same platform we don’t need to duplicate effort in maintaining and upgrading the functionality of both series. This lets us leverage any development work that we carry out on the sites so, for example, after we integrated the sites we were able to set up a single series of adsense channels which will improve our revenue stream in due course once the stats have had a chance to build up.

Next up for integration is our standalone sites for France. They’re a little more complicated in that they are bilingual so we’ll have to have a bit of a think about how to do that but, in principle, it’s easier to do now that we have made the amendments required to integrate the UK sites.

The single platform will also aid us in rolling out new country-specific sites which is very much a plus point. In fact, it will reduce roll-out time to under an hour rather than a couple of days as it was previously. And, of course, it will make rolling out new developments for the sites much quicker too.

Standing apart from the system these days we’ve not noticed first hand all of the chaos that has resulted in some of the reorganisations of UK government departments over the last year or two but can only laugh at some of it from afar.

Perhaps the best example is the Child “Tax Credit” and Child Benefit combination.

For political reasons, the Child Tax Credit is called a tax credit although, in all but name, it’s clearly a benefit payment. You claim it exactly like a benefit and it’s paid exactly like a benefit so it’s only the name that differentiates it. And that’s the problem: seeing as it’s been called a “tax credit” then it can’t be integrated with the Child Benefit systems thus saving a fortune on duplication of administrations and reducing the errors being made in payments.

That’s a recent one of course but the National Insurance Contributions have long been separate from Income Tax. The bands at which both are levied have been aligned for quite a while now so there’s no reason to keep them separate other than the political double-speak that called the National Insurance scheme an insurance scheme when in fact it’s merely another tax. If it were an insurance scheme then it would build up some money in the kitty but, of course, it doesn’t as the money is paid out as it comes in.

So when will common sense prevail and such nonsenses be put to an end? Somehow I can’t see it being anytime soon as there are just too many interested parties who it suits to have the current system perpetuated.

Blogging reviews seem to come in two basic flavours: 1) nice ones just to get the link and 2) proper ones that are actually useful.

Much as the first type serve their purpose in getting you a link to your site and they’re the safest ones to go for, they’re pretty much useless except for the linkback that they provide. In practice, they’re not overlly useful for that link either as, for the most part, bloggers with really high PR rarely review those with much lower PR who could benefit most.

The second type can be pretty scary though. After all, who among us has a “perfect” blog? Probably 99% of us have just picked the first reasonable looking template and ran with that so there’s usually a lot of scope for criticism on that front (my current one has been described as “Kermit the frog” for instance). Likewise, sod’s law applying as always chances are that they’ll look at your blog when you’ve just written a bunch of posts that are “less than your best” at best and more than likely they’ll be “total ****” even if all your other posts have been Pulitzer material.

But, that second type is far and away the most useful type to get. Sure, there’ll be things that you disagree with either partially or even entirely, but so what? You’re hardly likely to be writing stuff that people will agree with all the time, are you? On the other hand you’ll almost certainly get some useful ideas that you can implement to improve things. For example, about a year ago one one of the “type 2 reviews” that I got pointed out that it was a pain to have to page through endless posts on how to move to France and that I should collect them in one place, so there’s now a link to a compilation of them under “Series Collections” as you can see.

What a “type 2” review doesn’t have to be is nasty. Yes, you may well get a review where someone basically criticises everything on your blog (unlikely, but possible) but they don’t have to be nasty about it and I’ve yet to see one where they were out and out nasty.

Anyway, if anyone’s interested in a review from me, and will review this blog in return, let me know!