Friday, April 06, 2007
New Version of Rentalio is online
Rentalio.com vacation rentals site got a little face lift. Here is a few interesting things we learned in the previous period:
-Users do not like the web20 tag-cloud as the navigation element so we dropped it.
-Site definitions in the first sentence - Users landing from search engines were usually lost so we tried to fix that.
-Nice URLs - not only because of the SEO, but it reduces bandwidth
-Rock solid testing of all variables. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Rentalio. is a large-scale website with over 2.5 millions of pages but due to errors it became an infinite space of links with many duplicates. This was a problem for search engines.
We put in a lot of effort to redirect all existing links to proper new destinations so that the users coming from the search engines don't find themselves in the wrong place in this transitional period. We were in a dilemma while deciding if we are going to use the 301 permanent or 302 temporary redirection. In the end we opted for the 301 since we didn't try to speculate with the number of the indexed pages.
It would have taken a lot more time to develop the new version of Rentalio had it not been for the CodeIgniter PHP framework. We highly recommend it for your similar projects.
And something funny and a bit odd for the end. During the development of the new version we have set on our localhost virtual server "www.example.com" and in hosts file pointed it to 127.0.0.1. Google pagerank on the toolbar was 8 for non-existing domain.
-Users do not like the web20 tag-cloud as the navigation element so we dropped it.
-Site definitions in the first sentence - Users landing from search engines were usually lost so we tried to fix that.
-Nice URLs - not only because of the SEO, but it reduces bandwidth
-Rock solid testing of all variables. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Rentalio. is a large-scale website with over 2.5 millions of pages but due to errors it became an infinite space of links with many duplicates. This was a problem for search engines.
We put in a lot of effort to redirect all existing links to proper new destinations so that the users coming from the search engines don't find themselves in the wrong place in this transitional period. We were in a dilemma while deciding if we are going to use the 301 permanent or 302 temporary redirection. In the end we opted for the 301 since we didn't try to speculate with the number of the indexed pages.
It would have taken a lot more time to develop the new version of Rentalio had it not been for the CodeIgniter PHP framework. We highly recommend it for your similar projects.
And something funny and a bit odd for the end. During the development of the new version we have set on our localhost virtual server "www.example.com" and in hosts file pointed it to 127.0.0.1. Google pagerank on the toolbar was 8 for non-existing domain.
# posted by Rentalio @ 10:54 AM 
