Cheap Flights Becomes Database Driven
In order to ensure that the site is as fast and user-friendly as possible, the Cheapflights website design team has had to evolve its technology over the years. The site was a very simple one to begin with, without much in the way of dynamic database driven features.
Getting the prices was very time-consuming and very manual, with John Hatt using home workers to develop content. Hatt was based in London, but a lady in Cornwall researched the links and services on each destination page. Originally on a small scale, prices could be emailed or even faxed before being uploaded to the site, John was to quickly realise that it more or less needed a full-time data entry team.
Soskin recalls: "He had problems with the system his website designers were trying to build to automate this. This is when we created a database driven content management system for the advertisers to use to enter their offers, which interfaced with the main
database used to create the pages." Aside from accessing advertiser's databases in this way, the company also uses a tailor-made spidering solution called 'Cheapseeker' to strip offers directly from their Web sites, and it is this technological combination that allows the small team at Cheapflights to keep more than a million offers across its network continuously updated several times a day.
Yet again you see how the technology, software and coding that the website designers developed that held the whole Cheap Flights operation together. This meant a lot of research and interview with web developers all over the world. All this had to be done whilst still keeping the website search engine friendly. This was done by close coordination between the search engine optimisation experts and the website designers.
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