After conducting more research about creating a social website for hospitality users, I have found that there are already some on the internet. WIWIH being the most popular and this website seems to have most things on it that I want to do. I am now unsure if it is worth trying to think of ways to alter WIWIH and make it better, more accessible and add ideas that I had that they do not have, or stop and come up with another idea.

I have been thinking about other ideas that I could do instead of my social website idea. I have come up with three new ideas which I think might be quite good.

The first one is to have a system that combines breakdown services, (e.g. RAC / AA) with thousands of hotels and restaurants across the country. This could also be included eventually to Europe. The idea is that if you breakdown and are a member to one of the breakdown services that it covers, not only does someone come to pick up your car and take it to a garage, someone else calls up the hotels in the surrounding area to find a room and then someone else takes you to that hotel. For a pre arranged flat fee you can then have that room for the night or the day whilst your car is getting repaired. Once it is repaired, someone will deliver it to the hotel you are staying at and you can carry on your journey. If it is a simpler problem with the car then someone will take you to a nearby restaurant where you can have a meal for a pre arranged flat rate. I have done some research and there doesnt seem to be anything like this. I have asked people what they thought of this idea and they seemed to like it and have heard of several tales where people have broken down in the middle of the night and people have had to wait for hours in a cold car whilst the car is being fixed.

The second idea is to have a system that was to be put on all long haul flights which before you landed asked a few basic questions for you to answer on your personal TV. e.g. How was the in flight service / food /entertainment... How was the booking/checking in process. etc. This is all collected so people can find out a bit more on people’s opinions about each airline.

The third idea is a website to search for hotels. Obviously this exists in its hundreds, but my idea was more for the boutique, smaller hotels. For example the hotels that would all be in the good hotel guides. Smaller hotels without a website or much advertising that most people go to due to great word of mouth compliments. Also, Most people choose a place they want to go to and then choose a hotel. This idea can be reversed, in a case where you don’t really mind where you go, you want a small hotel in a nice location, it doesn’t really matter where. I was thinking that either this or the breakdown service one were the best ideas. Is this hotel one different enough to other websites, I couldn’t find anything that was too similar to this, and nothing for the breakdown one.

I have discussed these ideas with my tutor and I have been thinking about it more. I have unfortunately realised that in fact none of these are going to be right. They don’t meet the criteria strongly enough. So it is back to the Social Networking website. HostHub. I am just going to have to make sure I can make the site unique enough, as I do think it is a god idea. Social websites, in particular “Facebook” and “Myspace” have been incredibly successful. These all stem from somewhere else. I remember having “Bebo” during my gap year and then I was told about Facebook, which was layed out so much better, and seemed to be a much better site. Facebook has done incredibly well, and it still has a huge number of users. HostHub can work, as long as it is developed correctly, laid out and organised in a very user friendly way, and has good and useful services on the site.

I have spent some good quality time researching WIWIH and other such sites. Although many of my ideas already existed on WIWIH, some do not. For example, deals for those in the industry, a suppliers forum where people can buy and sell anything hospitality related. Also my idea of an online event set-up application, letting you plan an actual event from the comfort of your own home with all the links and help you could need. So I will try to incorporate these ideas into the website. It is key to try to get as many people as possible to sign up to this site who are in the hospitality industry, but also to when they sign up, input information about themselves in it. The site will not be as successful if people do not write a little bit about themselves. I would hope that going to conferences and exhibitions and other events for hospitality, we would be able to have a stall to try and sign up as many people as possible. Contacting big hotels and trying to ask them for their managers to sign up and put a couple of adverts up for it in staff rooms for other employees to sign up would be very useful. Also starting lower down, by getting in contact with universities which offer courses in hospitality management (or equivalent) and asking them to encourage students to sign up to the website.

Now I am back on track, know the concept I want to make and know what I need to be doing, I have started to design the website. I decided that the easiest way to plan the website was to start on paper, make a home page, and draw pages linking back to it, with key titles of the things I want to show on my website. Now this is done, I am ready to go back to Dreamweaver. I had some problems at first with this program, I have made websites before but using frontpage express so I found this program quite different. After experimenting around and doing the tutorial again, I was able to make my template which will be added to every page. On here, I have the logo at the top of each page which I made, then links to Home, features of the website, recommendations, about us and why host hub page – both of these to explain the importance of the site, a contact us page, and a references page.

I now have my frame for my website, it is time to start with the content. I did the easy part today, I have made the contact us page. I have put e-mail to links on this as well for ease of access to people that use the site. I have also put a brief introduction of what the site is about on the index page. I have also started to put references I have used on to the references page as well so I don’t lose track of where I used images from.

I have been doing some more reading about websites and have been reading about the 1998 Data protection act which HostHub would have to follow. For a summary of what this entails go to:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/Home/for_organisations/data_protection_guide.aspx
I am not sure if I will put anything from here on the website, but it was a useful thing to read up about.

I have updated the features page now, which explains exactly what the website does. I have used the navigation bar at the top as a guide to show what to explain. However I have decided that it would be quite a good idea to have a preview of the website as well. The features explains the site well, but an example profile page would be a very good illustrative selling point to investors, so I have started to create this.

Following on from my reading, I have been catching up on my reading. I have read a lot about internet security, issues on privacy and virus problems. This is important as a lot of my website will involve payments, (membership, and sales through the suppliers and deals lists.) From reading Laudon and Traver, 2008: “credit card fraud costs web merchants over $1 billion annually.” Bearing in mind this I have decided to put a couple of precautions on my website for HostHub, using paypal for one idea and also verified by visa to protect HostHub, “Customers are vetted by visa and issued a security code. Customers then can use this security code at online retailers, who are guaranteed payments. If a fraud occurs, visa pays the merchant.” (Laudon and Traver, 2008)

Viruses are also known as malicious code. “malicious code is a threat at both the client and the server level, although servers generally engage in much more thorough anti-virus activities than do consumers. At the server level, malicious code can bring down an entire website, preventing millions of people from using the site.” (Laudon and Traver, 2008) This would obviously cause massive problems if this was to happen so I will have to ensure this doesn’t by ensuring great virus detection software on the servers.

I was also interested to learn that “the vast majority of online customers claim they are concerned about online privacy but less than half read the privacy statements on web sites.” (Laudon and Laudon, 2007) I can understand why this is true, I will enforce that everything is encrypted to protect peoples data and make a more user friendly privacy statement for people to read.

I had a few problems finding some external pages at first as I was not entirely sure what kind of things to put in. After doing more research I have again updated the features page putting in links to hotelnewsresource.com, a site with lots of news about hospitality, a link to BIIAB.com which offers many hospitality related courses and Global-intd.com a great hotel suppliers website which supplies to many of the major hotel chains.

I have decided that I need to add a new internal page into my website explaining the different membership options as I have talked about it a bit on the website but without enough details. I thought of the best way to do membership. 4 different kinds, not 3 as I originally predicted. Bronze, silver, gold and advertising membership. Bronze is free, silver £30 a year and gold £50 a year and advertising £100 a year plus an initial start up cost negotiable on how much advertising will be done, this guarantees a company a dedicated webspace on the site. These are not big costs at all, as we want to encourage as many people as possible to join up. Gold is full membership, access to all pages and unlimited posts on news and advertisements and full access to job search and requests. Silver is a limited access to these and bronze can only buy and view but not put posts on the site.

I have conducted more reading and researched around more on the internet and I am ready to put my evaluation and analysis on the website under the about us and why host hub sections of the website.

I have gone through my website ensuring that all the links are correct and external links open in new pages. Many of these did not at first, and some appeared to be broken as I had not linked them correctly. These have been fixed now.

I have also noticed that everytime I preview the site in the browser, despite each internal page having a name it always came up as untitled document at the very top of the screen. I have spent ages trying to change this and put the name of each page in its place so you can see on the browser the title of what you are looking at. I have finally found it! Now all my pages are named!

I have kept updating the references page whilst I have been working, and now I am ready to complete my last page. Recommendations. On here I am putting my ideas on the best way to market this website and to help its success.

I am now editing my home pages text slightly to ensure that I can put meta tags into it. Meta tags are hidden words in the codes of the website which means everytime you search for something in google, google checks the meta tags of everysite, these then get placed in order of relevance and popularity in its search results. The only problem is that the meta tags have to also be in the main body of the home pages text. I have included the following tags: “hosthub” “social” “social website” “social network website” “hospitality” “hospitality industry” “hotels” “restaurants” “bars” “clubs” “bars” “suppliers” “free” “facebook” “myspace” “social site” Hopefully this will help us in our search optimisation!

I have now checked the website again and I am happy with it, everything seems to work and be accurate. I am ready to post the website onto webct.
My references are as follows:
Books:
Laudon and Traver, (2008) E-Commerce: Business, Technology, society. (4th ed.) Academic Internet Publishers Incorporated.
Buhalis, D. (2003) eTourism: Information technologies for strategic tourism management. Prentice Hall.
Laudon, K. C. & Laudon, J.P. (2007). Essentials of Business Information Systems; (7th ed.) Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Chaffey, D., Ellis-Chadwick, F., Johnston, K., Mayer, R. (2006) Internet Marketing: Strategy, implementation and practice. (3rd ed.) Harlow: Financial Times Prentice Hall.
Nyheim, P.D., McFadden, F. M. & Connolly, D.J. (2005) Technology Strategies for the hospitality industry, Pearson Education.
Images:
Home Icon: http://www.poasrentacar.com/car_hotel.html
Map of the world logo: www.genlogic.com/04.jpg
Profile logo on preview page: http://www.andymillar.co.uk/blog/index.php/2006/09/
External Pages:
My blog, on www.eblogger.com - http://htis.blogspot.com
Global - www.global-intd.com/
Hotel News Resource - www.hotelresource.com
BIIAB - www.biiab.org
London Bar Show - www.barshow.co.uk
Myspace - www.myspace.com
Facebook - www.facebook.com
WIWIH - www.wiwih.com