Foreign Perspectives

We’ve been offering free listings for holiday accommodation for over seven years now with quite a few changes to what we offered over that time.

Initially, we did the site by hand, taking in emails with the text and a photo then adding the property to what was then a simple list. That worked just fine ’til we got over 50 properties when it started to become a bit of a chore to keep up with the growing number of updates. That’s when we moved to the original database driven version of the sites (which had become plural by then) with a rise in the amount of text and the number of photos. As the years went on, we filled out the sites by offering more options for text and photos and variations on how we presented them with the general aim of producing a professional site but without the cost overheads. Depending on how you count them, we’re now on the fourth or fifth version of the site and possibly the sixth if you count the Android version that we’re trialling out at the moment.

One problem that we have which fully commercial sites don’t is that we need people to upgrade their entry now and again as we implement new facilities on the sites. Most noticeable is the resolution of the photos where we’ve moved from 150 pixels wide to 500 pixels at the moment yet still have some of the early properties using photos at the original low resolution. However, we’ve added heaps of sections from room descriptions, through local attractions to GPS co-ordinates which also need attention. We do prompt people to update their entry in our, slightly irregular, newsletters but it’s an uphill battle: people won’t update their entry without receiving more bookings yet they won’t get the extra bookings without updating their entry!

Along the way we’ve grown from the initial band of 20 property owners to six or seven thousand across the various sites. Although the original game plan was to offer totally free listings, we were prompted by a number of owners to add a charge. No, really! They felt that “free” meant that the listing had no value and there are a number of people who feel that way if the quality of the adverts we receive when we mention “free” is anything to go by. What we do these days is to say that it costs £40 or so but that there’s a free trial period. In practice, our listing is actually better than free as we do a free SEO review of your own website and we tidy up your entry so that it’s well presented on our sites. That free SEO review has been enough to increase the traffic on a fair number of sites around 30 fold so it’s definitely worth having!

The timing of the arrival of the adverts is still confusing though! I would expect them to turn up when the properties aren’t that busy so in principle we should have had next to no new entries over Easter but we received a good deal more than we normally do and pretty high quality entries at that too.

One big advantage that we offer over commercial sites is that all the development work is in-house.  The effect of that will be increasingly clear over the coming year or two as we will be rolling out a series of updates. Commercial sites generally contract out their development work and therefore only update their sites every three to five years. In principle, that should mean that we will gradually overtake more and more commercial sites in the markets in which we operate. For example, we’re in the process of writing a native Android app that would ordinarily cost around £15,000 or so which is a lot of money even for fairly large listings sites.

What’s been particularly sad to see over the last year is the massive rise in the number of people dropping out of the business. For us the drop out rate has historically been tiny but it’s around ten times the normal rate over the past year or so. Equally sad is the jump in the number of listings sites which have ceased operations: up from one to over 20 in a year.

With starting the new job the week before Easter, this is my first week of work holidays in over eight years!

As we normally do, it was off to Portrush on Easter Monday. Usually, there’s a mass of traffic along the way, a traffic jam a mile or two long going into the town, pretty much nowhere to park, wall to wall crowds everywhere regardless of the weather and no money in the cash machines. This year the traffic seemed a bit light on the way up, there was no traffic jam at all, loads of parking spots even quite close into the town, hardly any crowds and money in the cash machines even in the late afternoon as we were leaving. We didn’t even have to queue in the café and there was next to no queuing in Barry’s either. Methinks that Portrush is going to have a tough time financially if they can’t fill up even on Easter Monday.

Ongoing throughout the holiday has been the assignment for SD329 a biology cum psychology course that runs through to October. Although it was very much a last minute thing, it was a much easier assignment than the chemistry one which I’ve been ruminating over for weeks. I wasn’t too keen on the breakdown of every section of every question into a specific word count but it did prompt me to write a little more on some questions than I otherwise would have done which, hopefully, will improve the marks. Anyway, it’s off so it’s just the final chemistry question to complete tomorrow.

I came across a neat site which converts any website into an Android application so I’ve put on four trial ones. They look fine on the ASUS tablet but I’ll need to rejig the style sheet a bit to tidy up their appearance on Android phones. I may need to get myself an Android phone to really try them out too. No downloads as yet but then they’ve only been on a couple of days.

The materials for the Infectious Disease course arrived yesterday. No big surprises there as I picked up a copy of the pre-course briefing last year. I’ll have to get going on reading it properly soon as I want to get that well underway before I need to start the chemistry revision and indeed the pre-course work for the chemistry summer school for that matter. Oh, and the two assignments that’ll fall due in the midst of that revision time too. It’s going to be a hectic time for me in May and June.

The last couple of months have proved to be a very hectic time indeed.

The web design course finished at the end of February and turned out to be far more helpful than I could have imagined. What it let me do was to implement a massive upgrade to the inns sites and alongside that to similarly improve the SEO. Both tasks are still ongoing but only because the initial upgrade made it a whole lot easier to implement subsequent improvements. That in turn has made it viable to really ramp up the promotion of the sites and we’re pulling in new additions pretty much as fast as we can cope with them.

Following on from that course there’s a placement with a web company. In my case, it turned out to be what was seemingly the perfect job for me, aside from the salary. Unfortunately in many ways a full-time job came up just a couple of weeks after I started there so I was off to that at the start of April. Not nearly such an inspiring job but the pay is welcome.

In between the two we managed to finally get around to our major moving exercise from France. Somehow our estimate of half a Luton van of stuff (which we took from the photos taken when we first arrived in France) was way off and not only did we have pretty much a full Luton van but also a very packed car and still need a final car-run to clear out what we had to leave behind.

The job is causing a major readjustment for us all. For John, it’s the first time in his life that Daddy hasn’t been around all day every day for him. James is nearly as bad as he was only two when we moved to France. It’s an adjustment for Wendy too as I’m not around to look after the kids. And for me, notably in the study time which just ain’t there which is going to make the next few months very difficult indeed as the study doesn’t drop down to part-time until September.

To easy us in a little, I’ve taken the Easter week off which, hopefully, will give me a chance to catch up on some things.

I’ve managed to pile in a massive amount of stuff into the first couple of months of the year, hence lack of updates on the blog.

To begin with, the Chemistry course assignments have proved to be both more time consuming and less rewarding than expected. That’s had be starting to rethink the possibility of future chemistry courses. Essentially, I’m shelving them for the moment apart from the residential that’s already booked. That in turn frees up a chunk of time in the coming year so I might do the bio/psych course in October.

The Autism course is barely noticeable in terms of time required. Just this evening I finished the final iCMA with a 100% score in under 10 minutes and without even glancing at the book. All being well the EMA will be equally easy.

I thought I was behind with the signals & perception course but it turns out that I was running at a 60 point rate for a 30 point course so I’m well ahead of the official timetable.

The web design course being fairly full-time has forced me to rejig the times that I do the OU courses and it’s just as well that the workload this year was lower than last year or I’d have had to drop something I think.

The first fruits of the web design course are a radical update of the listings sites producing a major improvement in the look and feel of OurBedAndBreakfasts.com, OurHolidayRentalHomes.com and WholeEarthGuide.com . I’m hoping to double the number of properties listed over the course of the coming 18 months or so and as step one of that I’ve a bunch of adwords campaigns running. Upcoming tasks include refining the adwords campaigns, getting the B&B marketing guide assembled into book form and increasing the coverage of the Whole Earth guide which’ll keep me busy for the next month or two I expect.

After getting over the mountain that was the S204 exam, I feel that I’ve been really getting into the chemistry course over the past month or so.

I’ve the third assignment away this morning and it’s the first one that I feel reasonably confident about (though ’til the results come back it could easily be false optimism). Interestingly the biology course is proving increasingly useful as the course moves more into proper chemistry or rather moves away from the largely theoretical side of things and into dealing with how various chemicals react together.

One problem continues to dog progress and that’s that chemistry doesn’t fit easily into the computer age. Actually doing the assignments doesn’t take overly long for the most part but getting the various symbols and diagrams onto the computer eats up the time. To begin with you need to pick up an entirely different font from the normal ones to even be able to type the symbols required and, of course, those symbols aren’t on the keyboard so every one needs to be inserted as a special symbol. The diagrams themselves are equally easy on paper but need a range of software to prepare them for the computer. Even what would appear to be a simple graph can’t be done with normal spreadsheet software because you need to put sub and superscripts on the titles and axes labels.

Still, the plus point of that is that the course team need to make the assignments a little easier to do than they might do otherwise although with the large potential for a few errors to creep in between paper and computer screen, the marks haven’t (yet) reflected that slightly easier aspect.

Also this morning was the third iCMA for the autism course. As usual, it was four questions that could be answered by finding and reading a few paragraphs of the book for each one. Another 100% mark for me which means that I have passed the continuous assessment part of the course already with two more iCMAs left which, for me, are now effectively optional.

In comparison to the chemistry, the autism course is very much a stop-start affair. It’s around one iCMA per month covering one or two chapters of the book and with each chapter only taking a couple of hours to read it’s working out at two or three hours per month to do the course (compared to the official 8 hours a week). The net effect of that is that I generally do an iCMA then read the chapter(s) for the next one and then there’s nothing to do for three weeks. The problems with that approach are that by the time the next iCMA comes around, I’ve to revise the relevant chapter(s) before doing the questions and that overall it’s a very annoying way to progress through the course.