Places2stay has a well established web presence, it receives thousands of visitors each month looking for good deals on bed and breakfasts and Hotels. Originally the site was created to cater purely for bed and breakfasts but over the years it has integrated Late rooms huge portfolio of hotels and other accommodation.
In order to maximise the potential revenue from the site we decided to switch the focus from bed and breakfasts to hotels,. this required the full integration of Late Rooms XML feed. We took the decision to create the site from scratch with a full visual and structural redesign. This gave us free reign to add both technical and SEO touches which weren’t in the initial site. For example we added a dynamic Google map which adds the location of each hotel in a given location using the co-ordinates supplied by the Late Rooms XML.
The site is fully dynamic, retrieving live results and availability from the XML feed, this meant that all prices and dates were as accurate and up to date as possible. I also included Google weather API to display the weeks forecast for a chosen location. Even though the site may seem pretty large the code involved was kept to the bare minimum. We utilise a global script which creates each page of the site from one page of PHP.
Visually the site takes advantage of a few jQuery tricks. The content slider on the index page uses jQuery to cycle through each hotel. The menu system also takes advantage of Soh Tanaka’s mega menu (which i’ve been using a lot lately). I also implemeted an auto suggest feature which encompasses all of my favourite technologies in one feature (PHP, MySQL, jQuery, CSS and HTML) .
The site went live at the end of August 2010 and has already started to rank in Google for single hotels.
