Within the next two weeks we will have our new website ready to launch in closed beta (i.e. using live data, but before everyone else gets to see it).

We are looking for anyone who is interested in trying out the new version of the website and giving us some feedback or telling us about any bugs you find. The site will be about 95% there, it will be just the odd bits here and there might not work quite as expected.

You really don’t need any experience and often the less experience the better. You just use the new site and see what you think. If you want to give us feedback that is great. If you don’t that is fine too. Just being on the site and navigating around it will help us find any bugs.

If that sounds like something you would like to try, please send an email to support [at] directholidaybookings.co.uk or send us a tweet with the title “Beta Testing”. Once we are ready to go I will send you a link and a password so you can give it a try.

Everyone is welcome.

It’s a big day for us. Today our latest team member joins us, direct from his mum now that he is 8 weeks old!

Harry, a yellow Labrador, is just the cutest dog and already has the coolest laid back attitude. He loves the attention of all the people who come and go here in the office and, as people keep pointing out, already has more friends than I do!

We have no plans to give Harry his own Twitter account but we’ll post a few pictures now and again on our own Twitter page.

We are big fans of Open Source here. We make use of a lot of community lead development that is done for the benefit of the Internet community rather than to fund a big corporation.

With that in mind, I have been asked by Andrew to talk about a few of the open source or very low cost solutions that we use to manage our site. I recommend each and every one of them, so if you have a website or fancy having a bash at a holiday rental listing site, these are a great place to start:

Free and easy code to build the website:

• PHP coding language
• MySQL open source database

How popular is my site?

• Google analytics is a super tool to measure traffic and manage/improve the customer experience.
• Chartbeat.com allows real time measure of traffic and page load times (Small monthly fee).

How do I get feedback from users?

• Wordpress provide excellent blog software (this is what you are reading now).
• Uservoice.com provide the software we use to get bug reports and allow people to vote on important bug fixes and issues (small monthly fee).

How do I optimise my sites performance?

• Google Webmaster central is where Google will flag any problems on your site and show you how well its working.
• Google page load speed software is superb and allows quick optimisation of client (user) side performance.

Other bits I like:

• Thickbox is the system we use when you click on a link to make the screen black and show you an information window.
• Article Friendly is the company who supplied our article section (for a small fee).

So that’s it - the 10 free or nearly free things that we use each and every day to build and manage our website. Beyond them, it’s our time and a bit of luck that you like what we do and use/recommend our service. As I said at the start, if you fancy having a bash at making a holiday rental site, these tools will give you the entire building blocks you need to make something as good if not better than the big boys out there.

These tools are equally useful for any website. Just be careful - like us you may get addicted to it

Good luck!
Chris