Thursday, June 14, 2007
Things to do once you get there
Rentalio.com vacation rentals site started to attract more and more surfers. In cooperation with viator.com we have expanded our service and are now offering "Things to do once you get there" feature with over 4800 of offers from 70 countries.
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.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Tips for Eastern European webmasters
Rentalio is targeted to all world local markets, helping people to find Vacation Rentals. Google just announced very important guideline for Eastern European webmasters. More at official Google webmasters blog.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Tips for Eastern European webmasters
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Tips for Eastern European webmasters
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Rentalio on ProgrammableWeb.com
Just got listed at ProgrammableWeb.com in section travel mashups. Now we will see what other developers have to suggest us.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
First month
First month was very good. Site done and launched, service works fine, thanks to Vast API, our visitors may find useful data. Search engines are becoming more and more graceful and sending us visitors also we have nice percent of returning visitors.
First stage is finished now we will expand more stay tuned.
First stage is finished now we will expand more stay tuned.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
digg this!
Friday, September 08, 2006
Rentalio First Week Online
Last week was great week for Rentalio. First contact with surfers was fantastic. We had great feedback. Also we surf around looking what other people do and thinking aloud "what we should add to Rentalio to make it even more user friendly?"
We have found great travel community at travbuddy.com. It reminds on MySpace. Also interesting project is 43places.com. We do not intend to build anything like that.
Rentalio is about rentals and how to help users in that specific task "how to find good place for rent?". People may find great guides around the Internet, tons of travel related material. Also thousands of sites offer vacation rentals. Rentalio show and compare them at one place. We should focus on that more then adding other things that may distract from our primary service.
We have found great travel community at travbuddy.com. It reminds on MySpace. Also interesting project is 43places.com. We do not intend to build anything like that.
Rentalio is about rentals and how to help users in that specific task "how to find good place for rent?". People may find great guides around the Internet, tons of travel related material. Also thousands of sites offer vacation rentals. Rentalio show and compare them at one place. We should focus on that more then adding other things that may distract from our primary service.
