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Adding pictures and a map to your booking page.

Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 2:17 pm
by markkinchin
The property and room descriptions can accept HTML codes, this makes it possible to format the text or add images etc. to your descriptions.

Pictures must be hosted somewhere on the internet and have a unique URL. Include them with the following code, substituting the URL of your picture. This example will embed the beds24 logo.

Code: Select all

<img src="https://www.beds24.com/include/beds24.gif" alt="">
To embed a google map open the map at maps.google.com and zoom to your location.
Once you have the map located and zoomed correctly look for the LINK menu button, clicking this will provide an iframe code for the map, copy the code to your property description and the map will appear.

Re: Adding pictures and a map to your booking page.

Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2012 7:56 am
by Epicea_old
Won't that break the secure page?

Unless you store the image on another HTTPS site then _all_ browsers will see a mix of secure and insecure content and start showing warnings. It would be useful if we could upload to the beds24 server just a handful of images for this reason.

Re: Adding pictures and a map to your booking page.

Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2012 8:10 am
by markkinchin
Epicea wrote:Won't that break the secure page?
Yes it will.

If you are not collecting credit card numbers it is possible to set the page to use normal http instead of secure https.
You do this by opening it with "https=no" in the URL like the following.

http://www.beds24.com/booking.php?propid=334&https=no

This can also be useful when embedding the page in an iframe because some browsers on high security settings don't like secure iframes in normal pages.

The new booking page we are developing is planned to have a picture gallery function and be able to display a nice slide show. We are aiming for this to be ready by years end.

Re: Adding pictures and a map to your booking page.

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 8:57 am
by Epicea_old
This is quite a large problem. Clearly a large part of it is really social but there needs to be a better solution.

Obviously people do need to take credit card details so the page has to be secure. Adding maps, logo's and images is important so we can brand the page as being part of the property.

The branding we're able to do right now just isn't sufficient. This is timely as we just had a conversation with a guest checking out who had booked via booking.com. They wanted to come back and we said to look on our webpage as the prices and offers were more up to date, and obviously what we didn't say was booking were taking a huge commission.

These guests claimed complete ignorance of that and asked if we meant they should call or email and not use the website. Now I know for a fact they'd been on the website while they were here as they were the only guests and I saw them in the logfile using out wifi IP address. What was obvious, and not for the first time by a long, long way, was that the beds24 booking is entirely indistinguishable from a booking engine like booking.com or expedia etc. This is despite us having text saying it's our booking engine and these guests apparently being "IT consultants"

I know this largely social and largely related to deliberately misleading claims made by booking.com and others but it's a real problem. I need to make guests understand it's our booking page and that it's secure.

We started off using an iframe and dropped it as it doesn't look secure to users.

Re: Adding pictures and a map to your booking page.

Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2012 7:40 am
by Epicea_old
I do have a follow on question about iframes.

If I get a SSL certificate for our own site and embed the iframe in a secure page will that work? I can't really test it without signing up for another service. I'd want to keep the padlock for all browsers.

I will google a little and see what it says.

Re: Adding pictures and a map to your booking page.

Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:51 pm
by markkinchin
Epicea wrote:Adding maps, logo's and images is important so we can brand the page as being part of the property.
The new booking page that we are developing will include the following:
1) show a picture gallery with probably 6 or 8 pictures (securely hosted).
2) embed an interactive google map/street view. (if it works without breaking the ssl)
3) free areas at the top and bottom of the page where you can insert your own html.

Any other ideas for things we should include are very welcome.

Re: Adding pictures and a map to your booking page.

Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2012 3:15 pm
by markkinchin
Epicea wrote:If I get a SSL certificate for our own site and embed the iframe in a secure page will that work? I can't really test it without signing up for another service. I'd want to keep the padlock for all browsers.
If you mean the secure padlock will display in the browser I suspect the answer is yes.

I just did a quick test by embedding a secure page (using an iframe) in another page and looking at it using https, the secure padlock appeared in my browser.
When I look at the same page using only http the padlock does not appear.

There are so many possible browser versions and each user with their own customised security settings it is impossible to say it will work in every case but it can surely only help.

Re: Adding pictures and a map to your booking page.

Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2012 9:06 pm
by Epicea_old
markkinchin wrote:
If you mean the secure padlock will display in the browser I suspect the answer is yes.
In fact I think it's fairly certain that it does and that's demonstrated by pretty much any Facebook app which are SSL served iframes on other servers.

Re: Adding pictures and a map to your booking page.

Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2012 9:51 am
by amberbb
Epicea wrote:The branding we're able to do right now just isn't sufficient.
Being a nosey bugger, I'd like to take a look at your website, Epicea.

What's the URL, please?

Re: Adding pictures and a map to your booking page.

Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2012 11:25 am
by Epicea_old
Epicea wrote:
markkinchin wrote:
If you mean the secure padlock will display in the browser I suspect the answer is yes.
In fact I think it's fairly certain that it does and that's demonstrated by pretty much any Facebook app which are SSL served iframes on other servers.
I can confirm after a couple of months running this that it works well (i.e. using the Beds24 SSL iframe on our secure page). Obviously you need to pay for an SSL service and re-architect your site a little to rewrite/redirect to the secure pages but if you've the resources it's a good solution.