build and deliver

Book Search in New Zealad

2010-04-10T13:36:00.003+09:30

It's been a while since I worked on a new personal project (i.e. not something for a client) but I'm getting ready to launch bookish.co.nz a book price comparison site for New Zealand. I've scoured the web for NZ book sites but please let me know if there are any more you think I should add.

Note: I've got Whitcoulls working and am working on parsing The Warehouse. These are probably the two main bricks and mortar book sellers in NZ.

squidoo

2007-08-31T22:52:00.000+09:30

I'm now fiddling with what's possible on squidoo: http://www.squidoo.com/hotelbuddy/

It's kind of like what I want to do - build websites using other content but with your own special flavour. It's great that they've already added in the monetising part of the equation so you don;t have to pretend that the site is some personal experiment. Just get on and make some money.

Or you can, like I have done, elect to have the money donated to charity. Great idea. Not sure they'll make too much off mine though.

100 Top Hotel sites

2007-08-02T21:35:00.000+09:30

One of the blogs I read regularly is THE BOOT by Tim Hughes.

Recently Tim posted an article on a site that claims to rank the top 100 hotel sites.
If you love a list of hotel sites, you'll like (and hate) TOP 100 HOTEL SITES

Using one of my SEO test sites I set up a link as the TOp 100 requested and lo-and-behold I'm at number 309:
http://www.top100hotel.com/www.bellhop.co.nz.html

So a site about New Zealand Hotels is the 309th most popular hotel site on the planet.

It's even more popular than rooms-manager.com (Number 312) which describes itself as:

"ROOMS-MANAGER.COM, part of Priceline.com (Nasdaq:PCLN) is Europe’s leading online hotel reservations agency by room nights sold, attracting over 15 million unique visitors each month via the Internet from both leisure and business markets worldwide.
Established in 1996, ROOMS-MANAGER.COM offers competitive rates for any type of property, ranging from small independent hotels through to a five star luxury. The site is available in 15 languages and offers over 30,000 hotels in more than 8,000 destinations."

Update 4 Sept 2007: I'm now number 205, rising fast.

Rating: 3550 points* (was 3650 so someone has removed me ...)

*amount mentions of word 'www.bellhop.co.nz' on the other websites

Yahoo site explorer

2007-08-02T16:14:00.000+09:30

I've heard that the Google links: report is unreliable so I've been playing with Yahoo site explorer to see who is linking to me:

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com: www.hotelbuddy.us

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com : www.hotelbuddy.co.uk

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com: www.bellhop.com.au

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com: www.bellhop.co.nz

I think the results are more useful than Google's equivalent in the webmaster tools beacuse this lets you drill down into the results and also see when a page was last crawled.

Home on the range

2007-07-22T15:16:00.000+09:30

Poor Wyoming is the last State when listed alphabetically, so I decided to get that done now so it can start to be spidered.

It has sopme nice sounding counties:
Big Horn
Sweetwater county
or how about a visit the town of Thermoplois in Hot Springs County

tools

2007-07-17T13:06:00.000+09:30

I've been playing wiht a few domain and SEO tools.

http://whois.domaintools.com/hotelbuddy.us
http://whois.domaintools.com/hotelbuddy.co.uk

and checking out my sites on about.org:
http://www.aboutus.org/HotelBuddy.co.uk
http://www.aboutus.org/HotelBuddy.us

Region and county pages

2007-07-14T16:22:00.000+09:30

I've added a bit more info to these pages and added a width tag to the images so that the page loads faster.

Below are a few county pages from the US:
New London County Hotels, Connecticut
Bannock County Hotels, Idaho
Baldwin County Hotels, Ababama

and the UK:
Bedfordshire Hotels, England
Angus Hotels, Scotland
Cardiganshire / Ceredigion Hotels, Wales

I like how the Welsh regions also have the Welsh name.

more counties

2007-07-11T12:28:00.000+09:30

I added a few more:

http://www.hotelbuddy.us/Arkansas/
http://www.hotelbuddy.us/Louisiana/
http://www.hotelbuddy.us/Iowa/
http://www.hotelbuddy.us/Idaho/

in the hope that I can get these spidered and more links to the actual hotel pages.

US states and counties

2007-07-06T22:03:00.000+09:30

I've spent a bit of time trying to match US towns & cities with their counties.

Rather than buying in a list I've tried to fins other sources. Not as easy as I thought.

I have started adding a few manually.

I've added:
http://www.hotelbuddy.us/Alabama/
http://www.hotelbuddy.us/Connecticut/
http://www.hotelbuddy.us/California/
http://www.hotelbuddy.us/Florida/

and a few others.

But I think I may have to go and buy the data as it's taking too long.

protackr

2007-07-01T14:36:00.000+09:30

I've found this cool tool that allows me to track some stats automatically.

http://www.protrackr.com/track/www.hotelbuddy.co.uk

http://www.protrackr.com/track/www.hotelbuddy.us

http://www.protrackr.com/track/www.bellhop.com.au

http://www.protrackr.com/track/www.bellhop.co.nz

Hotels anywhere in the world

2007-05-17T14:37:00.000+09:30

Okay, so I got a bit carried away and registered www.hotelbuddy.biz but what the heck ...

I've tried to concentrate on country/region specifi sites but why not go global as well.

UK travellers can also get great deals

2007-04-13T21:49:00.000+09:30

And I've now added a UK site so travellers there can get a great deal on hotel rooms - http://www.hotelbuddy.co.uk

best deals on hotel rooms in USA

2007-04-13T21:48:00.000+09:30

I've now opened up a US site http://www.hotelbuddy.us so that American travellers can check hotel room prices.

How to get the best deal on hotel rooms

2007-03-22T16:32:00.000+10:30

With a little research, and an understanding of what you want in a hotel or motel you can get a great deal. Here's how

www.bellhop.co.nz

2007-03-14T20:22:00.000+10:30

And if it's worth doing once I can do it again: I've created a hotel rate comparison site for New Zealand.

www.bellhop.com.au - get great rates on hotels

2007-03-14T20:19:00.000+10:30

I've taken advantage of a link someone sent me to create a Hotel rate comparison site for Australia. It's currently up and running but I'm looking for some new design ideas and what functionality my audience will want.

Affiliate programs

2007-02-22T21:24:00.000+10:30

Part of my strategy is to sign up to a number of affiliate programs as sources of revenue. So far few of them seem to allow the kind of integration I would like and I'm running low on time to integrate the others.

My favourite find so far is GoDo. I'm not sending them a lot of traffic but they have some fun events and attractions.

2007-01-25T11:05:00.000+10:30

While I work out some of the final issues with events and attractions on www.must-see-australia.com I've added Google Ads so that anyone who comes across the site might find something useful. It's also started making me a little money which is nice to see.

Once I have events and attraction sorted out I'll be looking into booking engines for the various parts of the site. I've already identified a number of accommodation booking engines I can use. But I'll be looking into event based booking engines as well.

must see australia

2007-01-12T11:48:00.000+10:30

I've started working on my new site: www.must-see-australia.com.

It uses data from the ATDW and will include online bookings for accommodation and events when it's up and running.

Google Maps

2006-11-05T19:55:00.001+10:30

I've been looking for a good example of a .net (v1.1) google map (v2.0).

I stumbled across this article:
http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/ajax/working-with-google-maps
It looked interesting because they weren't using XML as the data source for map points.

I read the comments and it seemed not too many people had been able to get the code to work. So I've put together a sample and uploaded it here.