Crystal Coast Rentals » Updates to Owner Section http://crystalcoastrentals.net Rentals from Emerald Isle to Atlantic Beach. Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:56:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 New Look!! http://crystalcoastrentals.net/2009/11/04/new-look/ http://crystalcoastrentals.net/2009/11/04/new-look/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:17:06 +0000 admin http://crystalcoastrentals.net/?p=253 Wow!! I can’t believe its been about 6 months since my last post on Crystal Coast Rentals. I’ve been so busy lately I forgot I was neglecting one of my favorite sites. So tonight I hit her hard. We rolled out a new look and feel. Hopefully you like it. Tomorrow night I plan on finishing implementing the new look across the owner’s section. I’m also planning on making the owner interface a little more user-friendly as well as adding some new functionality. There will be a new category on the blog this year as well. Basically, I’ll choose random properties and write them up with their own blog page. Hopefully this will encourage rental guests to leave feedback on the different rentals.

Of course I’ll be screening them to some degree. I mean it’s nice to hear constructive reviews of any product. But if they’re just tasteless or rude they will not be published here. I was going to do most of the data gathering programatically. But I’m afraid creating and maintaining my own web crawlers is a little above my grasp of PHP and MySQL. But who knows, if it goes well, I may invest the time and effort into that.

Anyway, I’m going to try and be a little more dedicated in my blogging and site maintenance. There’s so many ideas and things I want to do, but I am a one man shop, with a full time job and busy social agenda ;)

So until next time, Happy Renting.

]]> http://crystalcoastrentals.net/2009/11/04/new-look/feed/ 2 Format Text for Rentals http://crystalcoastrentals.net/2009/01/06/format-text-for-rentals/ http://crystalcoastrentals.net/2009/01/06/format-text-for-rentals/#comments Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:15:36 +0000 Jason http://crystalcoastrentals.net/?p=70 I noticed that many of the owners listing their rentals, were having trouble with text formatting issues. Good news, I found and installed a script that provides you with a much more friendly interface to add or edit your property description. This should help those using the rental by owner section.

It always was possible to jazz your text up with bold, italics, or even link to another site for booking or other information. But now it doesn’t require a bit of html knowledge. You can simply highlight text click the link icon and create a link. You can bold text. It preserves line breaks automatically. This should encourage you to create a more enticing description and if nothing else make it easier for people to read.

You can still embed YouTube videos in the description too. In fact I plan on making a video shortly on how to add and edit your property on the rental by owner section. I think this will help a lot of folks.

So if you already have a property listed I encourage you to login again and jazz up the text a bit.

While were talking about descriptions…it’s much better for you, me and any other site you have your property listed on if you use a unique description. Don’t just copy/paste the same one here, vrbo, and all the others. This will prevent any duplicate content issues with search engines.

So get creative and really dress those rentals up!

Some upcoming updates:

  1. Provide ability to upload maybe 4-6 photos. The only issue here is storage and bandwidth. I have to pay for these images, and the bandwidth to serve them up to renters. Would you be willing to pay for YOUR photos?
  2. Workout a way to automate calendar setup. Currently its an entirely manual setup process.
  3. What other updates or new features would you like to see?
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