In tourism  normally multiple currencies are accepted (hotels, restaurants, diving centers). Many times an online pricelist with a different version for each currency is desired. Untill recently the office staff had to review  price lists weekly and update them based on the current exchange rates.

We wanted to avoid this tedious and error prone job for our customers and developed a self converting online pricelist in Euro, US dollar, Pound Sterling and the local currency (in our case the Egyptian Pound).

The reasons to redesign this website:

• adding the ability for the client to edit or add content themselves
• a new fresh look
• a need for visitor statistics (web analytics)

SSThistlegorm.com is mainly a simple informative site about the homonymous SS Thistlegorm book.

The Diving Bikers website is an example of extensive use of third party services.

• Flickr to host almost all images (Yahoo!)
• YouTube for the vids (Google)
• Facebook to allow comments and share posts
• Google maps  to show the routes
• Google translate to offer instant machine translation in any language
• Google custom search to move heavy database queries to their server
• FeedBurner to send newsletters and Twitter messages (Google)
• Woopra to offer web analytics
• FlagCounter to give some statistical insight also to visitors
• Geonames providing location names from GPS coordinates.

But can't we provide an upload for the photos ourself or run a video player on our own server? Yes, we can and we did in the past, but let's sum up some of the advantages of using third party services: