New Drupal Project - My Vacation Deals

I have created a new Drupal project website that can be found under the Motiv Drupal Projects block in my right sidebar. On this new project site I am focusing on Drupal SEO techniques and using arguments in views. I also plan on leveraging the context module whenever possible, as I feel it will be an easier to manage system than the default Drupal block system. I will most likely be using Panels as well and passing arguments into the panels to display content dynamically on my pages. The idea of the site is to provide useful information on popular types of vacations and popular vacation destinations around the world. Along with this useful information, the site will also provide up to date vacation deals to these destinations. My new Drupal website is called My Vacation Deals.

I got the idea for My Vacation Deals while I was looking to take a vacation myself recently. I have a strong SEO background, so after running a few searches and noticing how many sites were related to my searches according to Google, I had to take a look at how many times a month these terms were searched. The ratio of sites listed for these terms compared to the search volume was quite astonishing. It gave me the idea of creating this website that is not only search engine friendly, but user friendly as well, which will help others looking to take a vacation like I was determine their next vacation spot.

I have visited many different websites including other travel sites, official destination websites, and even sites like Wikipedia and About to research and gather as much useful information as possible on each vacation destination. I am also using SEO techniques to determine what are the top searched vacation spots and which vacation destinations are the most popular. You would be surprised how much information is out there on vacations, but just hasn't been put together nicely into a CMS like Drupal before. I am creating a robust tagging system for content, which includes the community tags module. This module allows for registered users to tag content inline on a node page. It is pretty slick and will help categorize vacation types, vacation destinations, amenities, locations, and activities while being user driven, which always provides better data.

While I have just started on my new Drupal project site within the last week, and I have already added several top vacation types and vacation destinations. I am currently still deciding on a few parts of the overall function of some of the features I want to add to the site, but I have already come up with come great ideas that I am implementing now. I also chose a contrib theme for the time being, as I feel that the one I chose fits very well with the overall theme of the site to begin with, beach. I might end up changing the theme to something a bit more custom down the road that includes more than just the beach, but I like the beach as a vacation destination and it fits.

My Vacation Deals is a work in progress, although isn't any website built on a Content Management System. I will be continuing to update the site with new vacation deals and new vacation destinations as I find them. As for the deals themselves, they will be coming from affiliate programs like Orbitz, Hotwire, and other programs that I am signed up with for now. Someday in the future I plan to offer deals directly from hotels and accommodations available around the world.