Reply to: Opinions on new website / business

Re: .

The whole point of the thread was (as you can guess from the title), I wanted peoples opinions - and they have been giving them - thank you.
I've taken these observations on board, and will be making changes based upon the comments.
Please keep them coming - this is the sort of thing I need to know!

Cheers
A

Well I think it looks and works pretty well myself. Nice bit of work that

.

The gist of this thread has been that people have suggested/wondered if your site offers a particular feature, and you have responded that it does, and cut and pasted a link.

Doesn't this tell you something? That the user experience is lacking any kind of intuitiveness. i.e. a user logs onto the site, and fom the word go is confused.

e.g. What is a 'Farecaster'? I know now because you told me, but having a very cursory glance round the site (and that's all you can ever expect of a user), I had no idea such a thing existed.

How 'bout rethinking the navigation/homepage. Prob'ly not what you want to hear, but IMHO I don't think you're going to get anywhere with the site the way it is now.

re: Oh. I get it

We do maintain a database of flight deals (under the Information menu -> Farecaster) :

www.flitesite.co.uk/cache...ontinent=1

But this just contains flights that people have executed a search on over the past few days, rather than pulling huge amounts of information from the airline websites every day.

Cheers
A

Oh. I get it.

So you're screen scraping the airline websites. Excellent idea.

An intelligent, fast search engine that brings up the *best* prices is the key to making it work.

And to speed up the searches, what about having some little bots running around airline websites maintaining a local database of flight deals that you could display - loud and clear - on the front page.

travelzoo.com have been doing this for about 5 years.

IMHO you are wasting your time with all the DHTML and 'content'. No one ever made a successful website out of looking pretty. Better to focus on the flight searches.

Toby

re: .

We're not using any reservation engine.
If you find a flight you like the look of, click on 'book now' and that takes you to the airline for that particular site and you book with them.

Cheers
A

.

What kind of reservation engine are you using?

Just curious...

re: Forget the techie stuff

We do have exactly what you want :
www.flitesite.co.uk/prici....php?cid=1
a simple screen asking where you want to fly from, where you want to go to and it then gives you a whole list of cheap flight! :-)
To get to it, just clip on the little $ icon on the first page.

Cheers
Al

Forget the techie stuff

All I want from a travel site is cheap flights. Just a a box with "where are you flying from", "where are you flying to" and "cost".

With sites such as Opodo, Lastminute et al, this is a very hard market to get into.

A site that is missing is a "lads" holiday site, with info on cities such as which bars have the best birds in, which bars show footie, which hotels will take 8 lads etc etc. How much should a taxi from the airport cost.

The same for women ie where do all the lads go (so they can avoid it).

On my screen it is fine until the browser width is greater than the actual page width (if you know what I mean...).

Even when the page is maximised I have the same problem.

Just changed my resolution to 1600 x 900 and it seemed fine until I dragged the corner of the browser out to change the size. Seems fine for me if the browser is maximised though.

Well, this is why I posted! really need to find all the issues and try to get them sorted!.
Thanks people!

Al

I'm getting the same type of issues as Thunderlizard, although the images are appearing to the left when I hover over the map...

I'm using IE6 with a screen res of 1400 x 1050...

If you're looking for a web tester at all let me know!! :b

nice site you are using PHP as well which is nice!

Yes, the site has been optimised around using explorer 5.5 so I'm not surprised you're seeing problems on Netscape.

The next major hurdle we have to get over is finding advertisers for the site - then hopefully we should indeed be able to have some special offers on the front page.

Should we start getting a bit of revenue going through the site we'll be ploughing that back in to make get rid of the problems you're seeing. There's only so much of our own money we can keep putting into it (contracting rates really aren't what they used to be ;-))

Thanks very much for the comments so far, thats really the sort of thing we need to be hearing!

Cheers
Alan

Looks good, but I can't really use it because the page is too wide to fit in my browser (Netscape 7.01) Also, when I hover over the map, the highlighted continent appears about 3 inches to the right of my little pointy hand, making it difficult to click on - is this supposed to happen?
Personally, you'd be more likely to entice me if you shoved a few bargain flight deals right in front of my face.