Good Times at L'Estaminet

Updated 3/15, see below

From the looks of it, the ladies at L'Estaminet restaurant in Grand Case had someone build a new website for their upscale eatery. But, rather than spending money on something that is proven to work: a profile on DineSXM, they decided to go the amateur route.

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Thanks Larry!

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm named after Larry Page. Google uses this algorithm as one of many factors to score documents (rank nodes) in the linked database that we all call World Wide Web. It was developed by Google's founders Larry and Sergey while they were students at Stanford University in the late 90's.

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What to do with "trophy" keywords?

It looks like we got an early Holiday gift from Google. DineSXM ranks #6 for Restaurant Reservations again...

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Analyzing search engine ranking results

Since our launch of DineSXM.com in February 2008, search engine traffic has contributed significantly to the site's growth. In the 3 month period from March 1st until May 31st 2009, approximately 63% of visitors came to our restaurant reservations and dining guide by following a link from a search engine. This number is up from 25% in the same period in 2008.


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Markus Frind - Inspirational Mind

The only way to grow a site once it's running itself is to have brilliant ideas. Great ideas don’t come from sitting in front of the computer screen for 8 hours of the day wondering what to do next. You have to be inspired or have a really deep understanding of what is going on. So a Brilliant idea may start a business but you need to have many many more brilliant ideas if you are going to go from one of many to an industry leader.

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DineSXM Restaurant profiles "I18n"

I have just finished implementing the first internationalization ("I18n") features on DineSXM. Each of our restaurant descriptions can now be automatically translated from English into French, Dutch, Spanish and German. The translation quality is not perfect, it's done automatically on-demand through Yahoo's BabelFish service, but should still help those guests whose mother tongue is not English to get a better idea of what a restaurant has to offer.

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St. Martin / St. Maarten restaurants on Twitter

You can now follow DineSXM restaurant updates on Twitter - go to http://www.twitter.com/dinesxm and click the "Follow" button to stay on top of news, updates and additions to the St. Martin and St. Maarten restaurant guide at DineSXM.com. Jump to the DineSXM blog for the remainder of this post.

Get dining reviews on your blog!

Fresh SXM dining reviews and St. Maarten / St. Martin restaurant news is now available in RSS format from DineSXM. We have added a second feed that displays the 10 newest restaurant reviews, in addition to our main feed of DineSXM articles and restaurant profile updates.

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TurboCharging the DineSXM reservations engine

As DineSXM moves forward from its current Beta stage to an industry-strength restaurant reservations platform, the development team (ehm, that would be Norbie) keeps on working diligently to tweak performance, presentation and functionality in a way that makes the site more intuitive to use and better able to accept so-called "corner cases" like variations in opening-hours and meals served.

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And people still use IE6...

The "Beast of Redmond" has done it again.

In its infinite wisdom, Microsoft decided to push out an XP update on July 22 that caused the IE6 browser to stop displaying perfectly valid HTML pages while providing the visitor with a discomforting but otherwise totally useless "OPERATION ABORTED" error message.

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