Vacant Ready
In the weeks since BarCamp Vancouver 2007 and the last nPost.com/JayAndSilentRob.com Networking Event (with a new one already announced for early October), I’ve been absolutely swamped and had a difficult time posting about the news, events, and most importantly, the people and sites that I was introduced to in the month of August.
One of those sites is Vacant Ready, a blog by Chris Clark. As is stated in the About Vacant Ready page, the term ‘vacant ready’ is a term in the hospitality industry that means a guestroom is clean and ready to sell. The blog is almost a year old, and caters to those in the hotel industry - relevant, entertaining insider hotel content in a fresh, engaging format.
Chris has done some really good things on the site to add value; you can login and become a member of the site, there is a link to his Vacant Ready Flickr photos (and the opportunity to add your own), a Google Maps page with Vancouver-area Hotels, a hospitality jobs section, and a link to UrbanDiner, home to the restaurant scene in bc.
This is a great example of a very niche-oriented blog. Although I don’t agree with using such a slender design (I can’t design a site for a screen resolution below 1024 x 768, but that might be a personal bias), there’s a good balance between the available information (which is plentiful) and having a clean design. The colour scheme even feels like a hotel, which I’m sure was planned.
For those of you interested in the hospitality/hotel Industry - especially the Vancouver scene - I definitely recommend a read on anything from the possible strikes at four Vancouver hotels to some of the local hotel rennovation projects. If you are looking at starting your own blog, especially one catering to a very specific niche/market, this is probably a good example of how to do things right (or at least mostly right). 