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.

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

Up until now we have allowed all private owners to list their properties for free. That’s really helped us out, allowing us to grow quickly and listing a combined 110,000 holiday rentals, of which nearly 15,000 are private owners.

We have generated tens of thousands of leads for our charter members and we are delighted that almost all have stuck with us. It’s been great getting feedback like, “Wow - this is the first booking I have ever taken from a free listing site”.

But all good things come to an end, and we are now closing the door on charter member status for any new properties listed with us from Monday 25th May 2009. Existing owners keep their free charter status but new members will have to pay a small monthly fee.

So, it’s your last chance for the free listing of your holiday rental.

We have just released the latest batch of search improvements, making it far easier to find what you are looking for.

As we pass 100,000 holiday rentals it is more important than ever that you can find the rentals that match your exact requirements.

The changes are:

- You can now search for anything you want related to your property, for example “dog friendly”. Just search whatever is important to you.

- When searching for a city/town we attempt to match locations in close proximity into the search result.

- The availability search (by date) has been improved and now returns a totally reliable result.

We have also released a change to improve the usability of the availability calendar when a customer chooses not to keep their calander updated. This avoids the need to load a blank calendar page and makes the process of you finding your next rental a bit faster.

We welcome today Premier Holidays and Bungalow.net as the two latest agents to join our community.

Here is a great Ibiza Villa by Premier Holidays and here is a great holiday home from Bungalow.net. They are both great agents with a great stock of good quality holiday homes, all of which can be booked on-line.

I would also like to take the opportunity to thank all of our private home owners, agents and visitors for being part of our community. Thank you.

We are absolutely delighted to welcome Hoseasons, who have over 12,000 properties for rent in the UK and mainland Europe.

I recall from my childhood that Hoseasons was THE company to deal with for Holiday Park, Boat and Cottage holidays. I spent many a happy summers as a child in a Hoseasons park or cottage. Since then they have moved into mainland Europe and now have some best of breed villas available.

Here is a great example of one of their holiday villas in Costa Blanca, Spain.

We welcome today the TWO latest Agent to join our community.

European rental agent Belvilla provides some spectacular holiday homes with more than 12,000 properties available in 16 countries. I really liked that they also have a dedicated quality control team personally select and check all accommodation so you are guaranteed peace of mind.

Here’s a link to a great example of one of their rental properties:

Georgous Belvilla holiday villa

James Villas list some of the most beautiful holiday villas. Established in 1984, James Villa Holidays is the leading villa tour operator in the UK. They pride themselves on offering you hand-picked, quality accommodation, at an affordable price. Truly beautiful!

Here’s one of my favourites:

James Villas beautiful property

Today we welcome onto our website Clearstay, a leading US based holiday rental listing site, with loads of great holiday rentals throughout the USA.

The thing I really like about Clearstay is that they allow you to pay for the holiday properties on their website in real time. Due to lots of clever technical wizardry, the availability of their properties is  always 100% accurate, so if you book a rental property with them you know that the booking is guaranteed.

Here is an example of one of their properties:

Holiday Apartment In California

Every day the iphone seems to be building more momentum, with applications that allow you to search property listings starting to appear. The question is, would you ever use a mobile telephone to search for a holiday rental?

We had a quick brain storm here and we came up with the following pros and cons of having such a service:

Pros

- You can search for your holiday rental when you are sat on the train/bus or on lunch at work.

- If you find yourself stuck away from home, rather than pay top price for a few days in a hotel we could show you local holiday rentals with availability. We could even direct you there using the iPhone inbuilt GPS.

Cons

- The small screen makes means the images are a bit smaller.

- With lots of images available you would need a decent 3g/WAN connection to download all of the detail quickly and easily.

- You might just wait until you are at your PC to look for holiday homes to rent.

Personally, I love my iPhone and couldn’t live without it now (although may be forced to if I drop it again!). Question is, would you use your iPhone or other mobile device to search for holiday rentals?

Here’s this weeks summary of site changes and improvements.

The first important batch of changes is to improve communication channels:

• We added a “report for admin review” link to every advert. That way, if anyone spots a problem with a property advert they can alert us and we will review it.
• We added a “dissatisfied?  help us improve” link to every main page, so anyone who has been anything but fully satisfied by our service can let us know. We will read every report and take your feedback VERY seriously

We really want to hear from you, good or bad, so please use these tools to let us know how you find our site.

Other changes:

• From next week we are saying goodbye to the adverts from Hertz and The AA. We trialled them for the last 4 weeks and feedback from the community has been poor. So the’re gone.
• From next week we welcome to the site “Rent Villa France” as a partner who brings a further 600 excellent properties from central France.
• From next week we are removing our Google site search and replacing it with a more user friendly search. While the Google search servers were great (and bright yellow in colour too), it just wasn’t able to supply the kind of search experience holiday makers were expecting.

As always, more improvements next week.