Wahanda TechBlog

The last couple of weeks we’ve been really focusing on improving some areas of the site previously untouched since we launched almost a year ago.

Venue Listings

Formerly known as the spa listings pages these have lagged behind some of the newer types of entity on the site.

We now have over 3,000 active venues worldwide and browsing through them wasn’t the quickest or most intuitive process.

In the latest release they’ve been completely revamped with new filters, list controls, mapping functionality and content.

The filters are based on the design we use for products and therapists and should make browsing through the list of wellness venues on the site a little more straightforward.

Venue Listings

Venue Types

When is a Hotel Spa a Day Spa? When is a Fitness Centre a Yoga Studio?

Sometimes they just have to be both!

As of the new release a venue can be categorised as up to 3 different types rather than just the 1 previously.

This means if you run a Hotel Spa but accept non-hotel guests (i.e. as a Day Spa) you can now be found in both the Hotel and Day categories.

Simple.

Contact Details

For some time now we’ve posted an ‘Email the Venue’ link on listing pages. However there were a couple of problems with this functionality.

• Users needed to have an email client configured (doesn’t work with webmail).
• Not everyone wants to give out their email address.
• Emails sometimes get lost.

We’ve now converted this link into a small form. This should solve the problems above and mean we help more customers get in touch with the right venue.

Venue Email Form

Promoting Deals

Until recently we’ve always showcased the deal with the best discount or lowest price on a venue page.

We’ve now added the option to specifically select which deal appears in the all-important summary space.

Community Hub

When we first launched our community page last summer we didn’t have that big a community to showcase.

Fast forward to now and we have a ton of great content coming all the time, from venue reviews to therapist blogs. As a result we’ve restructured the community hub to be a little more useful.

We’ve added links to all the latest blog entries, added more profiles to the “Most Active” section and a bunch of other tweaks.

Enjoy.

I really can’t believe we’re already on our 22nd release!

For those used to products from the huge megaliths of Microsoft and Adobe this must sound like a very large number of releases. In some ways it is. Excepting special circumstances (e.g. Christmas or everybody getting some strange virus) we release a new version of the website every 2 weeks. Each release gets a new number. We’re about 6 weeks away from our 1 year anniversary hence… Release 22.

We did think about using sub numbers so we would be like the cool kids (e.g. 0.5.1.22) but we’re too long in the tooth to worry about what the coolest kids are doing.

It make take some time to get the format for these release posts right. This is the first one so expect a certain rambling element and lack of polish.

Findability

We’ve been working hard of late on what we like to call ‘Findability’. Release 22 included a lot of work on what we call products but what everybody else insists on calling Offers.

We’ve re-designed the product listing page, adding such coolness as filters, sorting and a handy map.

For example this page is all of our products we’ve tagged as special offers. On the left of the page we have filters for price range, location, treatment and days of the week for which the product is applicable. Nifty.

Community

‘Most Active’ algorithms updated

We’ve made a tweak to the most active lists on the community page to take around 6 months of activity into account. Previously we were only using a couple of weeks so it was disproportionately favouring newbies, something a few of your noticed and didn’t like.

Privacy Options (for Therapists)

Those that have been following us for a little while know we released a major update to our therapist management area back in January. I this release we added privacy options. If you’re a therapist you’ll find it on the right hand menu when you’re logged into your profile.

Currently all that seems to make sense if the ability to control whether or not others can see you email address, phone number or website address. As we add more functionality you might want hidden we’ll add additional options here so it can be protected.