Since we let Jon off the leash and let him loose as our Press Relations type person, it’s been pretty cool to watch. If like me you’ve had absolutely no dealings with the press, you really are missing a great opportunity to promote your site. Journalists are hungry for stories! Sure, being a journo sounds like an interesting job, but like any job they have to meet the demands of the person higher up the food chain. Feed them a reasonably interesting story and they’ll bite your hand off.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the first decisions we ever made when building HW was that we’d deeplink as much as possible, whether it be from a hotel or resort page, we’d link to the same hotel / resort page on the merchants site. It wasn’t a new concept by any means, but we knew it would increase the usefulness of the site, and our workload.

As I type, HW has 50,273 unique deeplinks to a total of 39 merchants websites; 47,316 are individual hotels and 3,137 are to resorts. It’s worth pointing out all link codes are added manually to each hotel / resort to ensure they are accurate and that they work. At this time of year we get the stock lists from most of the holiday companies for the following season, lots of fun sorting that out!

Read the rest of this entry »

Today sees the seventh member of the HW team complete her first arduous week with us! Hi Bex, and well done on getting through it!

So how did we get from two guys IM’ing from our spare rooms to a company of seven? Well when it was just Chris and I to begin with, we just worked bloody hard to keep everything working after we built the new site. After a while we were getting so many reviews (it seemed like a lot then!) it was hard to keep up and get on with developing and maintaining the site and other projects, so we took on Mark (Nov 2004) to help out with the day to day running.

Read the rest of this entry »

Came across this last night while reading a few blogs. It caught my interest as it could be applied to our site, and like the best of ideas it all just seems like common sense when you read it.

“The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.” Rohit Bhargava

Read the rest of this entry »

Having worked on a few new sites this year, we often had to cope with multiple merchants XML feeds, as is typical with travel sites. We started with the normal “serial” method which queries and collects the data from each in turn, i.e. when data is returned from Merchant 1, start the query on Merchant 2 and so on.

We then came up with the concept of “concurrent” queries, sending our search requests simultaneously and listening in the background for completions. This meant the user had to wait for as long as the slowest data returned, or when our set time limit had passed.

Read the rest of this entry »

We recently got a bit of press for helping to highlight a holiday scam. A post on our forum led to more and more posts and eventually we contacted a few journos to point them in the direction of the story.

By this point the Met Police were involved and the people behind the company had fled. The story got picked up by a few of the national and regional papers and the BBC amongst others.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, you probably know the Mum and Dad got together bit, I mean how did I end up here, writing this blog?

Well, after spending most of my twenties being serious about rugby I got a bit of an ankle knock that put me out the game for a while (as it turned out - permanently). Several months of being a Championship Manager junkie followed.

Read the rest of this entry »