Usually a marketing tool generally overlooked by UK shoppers, this year the discount voucher is making waves amongst many top brands in the run up to the biggest spending weeks of the year.
It started with Threshers giving a South African wine company a 40% off voucher to distribute amongst their employees, families and friends. They posted the voucher on their website, and it went “viral”, with the BBC reporting the voucher had been downloaded over 800,000 times. Read the rest of this entry »
November 28, 2006 at 00:13
· Filed under Web Stuff
In early 2004 I added a few of our sites to the Yahoo Directory, paying around $200 per listing if I remember correctly. To do this I created a Yahoo email account, which I didn’t really use for anything else.
So around a year later, the listings were due for renewal. As I hadn’t checked the Yahoo email account (or the backup) the renewal dates passed me by. The credit card on account was no longer valid, so no payment was taken. About 2 months after this I actually remembered that these payments were overdue. I contacted Yahoo billing department, to update my credit card details and hopefully make the payments belatedly. Read the rest of this entry »
Enjoyed a trip to the borders last weekend to watch Jed-Forest v Hamilton, where we snatched defeat from the jaws of a draw, losing to a penalty in injury time. It was pointed out that Hamilton haven’t won a game since we had our logo put on the strips!
Currently sixth in the league, here’s hoping we can get the season back on track next Saturday when Stew Mel come to visit. Break the jinx!
Two Sunday papers carried stories about hotel review sites last weekend, reporting their shock and horror that it is possible to add a review for a hotel you’ve never been to and even hotel owners post reviews of their own hotels!
You can imagine how shocked we were, why hadn’t it ever been pointed out before! What would the great British public think if they found out? HW Headquarters was awash with a wave of cynicism and suspicion.
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.
November 13, 2006 at 00:02
· Filed under Web Stuff
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!
November 11, 2006 at 00:03
· Filed under Misc, Web Stuff
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.
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
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.
