Foreign Perspectives

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.