A business establishes a competitive advantage by having a website that can be maintained more efficiently than that of competitors. A website that can be updated more rapidly offers new products to potential customers first. This is a competitive advantage we decided to build into our web design for an online TRAVEL CLUB OFFERING TOUR AND CRUISE VACATION PACKAGES to worldwide destinations.

In researching competitor travel club websites, we noticed that in some cases, they were slow to update the seasonal travel packages offered. In fact, outdated content may not be updated for weeks. In most cases this is because they must go through the time-consuming process of hiring a webmaster to do the necessary updates. Suppose we could give the client the ability to easily update their website in minutes in-house, instead of needing to expend time and money consulting a web designer? This will allow our client to feature new travel deals days or even weeks ahead of the competition! To make it possible, we first created a web design that is fully integrated into a custom Content Management System (CMS). The CMS allows our client to add new content pages in minutes that adhere strictly to the web design structure we established. The CMS is easy to learn, usually requiring less than a half hour of training. It also provides instant updates, and is password accessible on any Internet-enabled computer.

Secondly, we created standards for all graphic images added to content by the client. There are only two images sizes used by the client. One is a 359w x 203h pixel image size for all images used with featured content and a 164w x 93h pixel image that is used for sidebar content. These limitations insure that all images inserted by the client are consistent with the design of the website. This protects the integrity of the design and speeds up the process of image creation.

Thirdly, we made sure the navigation menu and all links are in plain html text. This allows for faster website updates, avoiding the time needed for editing elaborate graphic, dhtml or Flash based menu's. The plain text links provides the added advantage of insuring that all links are easily followed by search engines indexing the website.

Finally, the web design is minimalist, using a subtle grid theme The photos of travel destinations featured by the client are the focus of the design. The end result is a handsome hard-working web design that is easily and quickly updated.

OUR TRAVEL CLUB premieres on Dec 15, 2003.