The transition process from old to new site has been slowed down considerably, mainly for the following reasons:
- First various hiccups and days down at our ISP provider. I must say that I am very disappointed with them. After more than two years hosting my blog Happy Hotelier without hardly any such problems, I decided to move my sites to them and then all of a sudden I count 4 whole days of non service for various reasons in the past three months. Not acceptable. Off course I’m looking for alternatives, but haven’t found them yet….
- Secondly I’m having troubles with my channel manager. “What is a channel manager?” you will ask. A channel manager is a way of keeping your room inventory up to date in one place. From that inventory there are several sites where the rooms can be booked. If, as a small hotel, you don’t maintain your inventory in one place, the risk is high that you are getting overbooked. If you like to maintain a top level of service, you will understand that you will be having a lot of egg on your face if guests come with a reservation to find you have no rooms available for them. I believe that would be the worst possible experience for a guest
- Still I haven’t decided about the language issue. I have a feeling that at least there should be a mirror of this site in the Dutch language, my native language, because when I look at the Dutch Google translations of this site, it doesn’t make sense. I fear the same with other languages…but a new version of the plugin has arrived. Let’s see whether that works better.
- Design issues. There is a new version of the framework for this site to arrive soon. Hopefully I need less hacking around with that new version than I need to do now to further the site’s look and feel
- One of the major issues is the widget for the availability of our suites. I want to incorporate that on every page of this site in a manner that is easier for our visitors…I need more asking around to get what I want
- And finally a very good reason: We are getting more and more guests in the first three months of 2010!
Nostalgia screen shot of HaagscheSuites.nl
After the unpleasantness of the hack and other duties, I just had some time to consider the color scheme of the new site. This is very easy to do and very easy to change with the Thesis theme I’m using.
I’ve made a screen shot of the soon to be old site that served us so well for over 8 years. I was so proud of it, because:
Much thought had gone into:
- Very fast loading, essential when many people were still on very slow internet connections.
- Showing as many photos as possible without slowing down the loading speed of the page. We preloaded them..nifty.
- Address and telephone numbers of Haagsche Suites on every page for easy reference for our guests.
- Even the e-mail address was always shown, despite everybody warning against it. Mail spam was easily handled with spam filters in our mailbox.
- When applied, I thought the drop-down menus were a killer application. They enabled us to keep all the links within the one-page-without-scrolling principle we tried to maintain. The only disadvantage of a drop-down menu is that not every user appreciates it. I’ll have to think about that as well here.
- The color scheme worked fine. Easy to read and just a bit different of the rest of the hotel sites. Before going wild on colors I will just bring the colors her close to the old scheme.
- One of the big brain breakers is how to have your site in two languages. We used to have an English language landing page and each page linked to the Dutch equivalent and vise versa.
What is wise for the new site: To concentrate all languages at one url here (the .com one) or to put the English language part at the url here with the .com extension and the Dutch language part at the url with the .nl extension? Do you have any ideas?
And that is one of the problems you may face: Somebody “Defaces” your site just when you’re putting a lot of effort in building it. Luckily we’re up again. If you’re interested you can read more about it over at Happy Hotelier…For now I’m having doubts about my Internet Service Provider…
Again I’ve revamped the site. Now it has a static home page and dynamic blog posts. Apart from the lay out and the logo this seems the set up we are going to work with for a while. This time the main concern was to have the availability and reservation calender up front as those in the know tell me that that is a necessity for a landing page of a hotel site.
I’ve added Translator pro. Translator pro is an automatic translation plugin for WordPress. It is not ideal, because the translations are machine translations and not very accurate. However, being a small hotel, we cannot afford the fees for real translations. At the same time the content of this site will change frequently. Translator pro currently offers translations for 42 languages. I’ve enabled some.
Translator pro offers two ways of creating translated pages. One is to store the translated pages as temporary html pages and the other is to store them into the WordPress database. For the moment I use the former way, as I’m afraid the database might become too bulky to handle when making backups. We’ll see.
Translator pro also caused me to change servers first before diving into this adventure of creating a WordPress based website for Haagsche Suites. When testing it last year over at Happy Hotelier it proved to take so much space on the server and also to take so much time to load, that the change of server was imperative.
Today I managed to upgrade this blog to WordPress Version 2.9. I’m not sure it is because of this update, but certain errors now have disappeared. For a wrap up of all the new feautures I can point to this post of: Bit Wire Media
It snowed in the Netherlands. Snow in the Netherlands is not strange in itself, but it happens seldom that we get 10-15 inch of snow in one day. So I took the opportunity to take some photos of the garden with this layer of snow and decided to make a Season’s Greeting card of one of the photos.
To all of you:
Merry Christmass and Happy New Year
From the Garden of Haagsche Suites
In addition I have now some time to devote on the development of this blog.
I haven’t posted for some time, because of several developments with the two other blogs. The main development is that I changed my Dutch hosting company that hosted the Haagsche Suites site. The two blogs were already hosted by my present Dutch hosting company, but there was a dire need to change server at their site for various reasons among which was my desire to have the three blogs hosted in a PHP MySql version 5 environment, the most preferred environment for self hosted WordPress blogs nowadays.
Those migrations I did a bit clumsily myself. With as a result me manually editing a couple of thousand posts. I’ve not finished that project yet, but at least to an extent that I am able to go on with this project.
