My first post on the blog and it’s about Local Nights Out. The idea was to keep this blog separate from Local Nights Out but I guess i’ll probably post more of the technical side of my Local Nights Out work here and the more “user news” on the Local Nights Out blog. Besides there’ll be plenty more to talk about here in addition to “work stuff”.
Anyway here goes. Today I have been working on a new landing page for Hotels. We had had some feedback about the difficulty of finding a hotel to suit your requirements, say in a specific area of a city rather than just in a city. I kind of new this anyway but hadn’t got around to doing something about it until now. That is apart from the new Google powered site search that went live about a week ago. The site search is an improvement but is limited in that it only displays the pages indexed in Google (which currently stands at over 7,500 so not bad) and displays the results as Google does i.e. not with the pictures and Local Nights Out normal styling.
So, the solution. The hotels on Local Nights Out are provided in partnership with LateRooms so today I have created a new hotels landing page which incorporates a search box enabling you to specify your desired location (by way of postcode, town or attraction), number of nights, number of people and the dates. The search box is javascript powered and will direct the user to a results page in a new window where prices and more details can be compared.
The page itself is based on the homepage and includes the same sidebars but in creating the new hotels page I have made some modifications to the code of not only the new page but the rest of the site as well. As well as the search box the hotels page also has a list of featured hotels much the same as the theatre page has a list of featured shows and the homepage has a list of featured venues/events.
I decided the featured items would look better if the images were a bit bigger than they previously were so I have increased the size they are displayed at from 67 x 50px to 87 x 65. To make use of the space to the side of the larger images more of the description is now shown as well. The images and titles of the featured items, which link to the full details, previously had a title tag of “View Advert” which to be honest is pretty poor and I can’t believe I have overlooked it for so long. The code has now been modified, not only for the hotels page but also for the homepage featured items, to use the name of the venue/event as the title tag. (The title tag is displayed when you hover the mouse pointer over a link).
On a side note I have also modified the code of the Theatre page to display some of the shows that have special offers either on ticket prices or meal deals as the featured shows. The featured shows were previously added to the Theatre page manually which required manual updatng which will no longer be necessary.
Finally by way of the ISAPI_Rewrite engine from Helicon Tech I tidied up the url by removing the .asp extension of the hotel page to make it more user friendly and did the same with the theatre page while I was at it. Tomorrow I will do the same for the restaurants page and dating page as well.
You can see the new hotels page here and the new look theatre page here.
Tomorrow I will report on my first Joomla built site which is about to go live.
