State of the Site "99" ------------------------ Hello, I hope everyone had a fine time during the holiday season. Well, the new year is upon us and its time for me to update you on where we are headed this last year of the century. * Everyone should email a set of their 99 rates as soon as they can. Thank you to those who have already updated their rates. * If you haven't noticed. I have changed the look of the main page slightly and added a site search engine and a www search engine to goto.com. * In the weeks ahead I will also be changing how the state pages look quite a bit. As more and more sites join on, we need to make the navigation easier for vacationers. I will be adding a state sections level to the page. Rest assured, the url that goes directly to your page will not change. * This years focus will be on visibility. In that respect I have done the following... a. I purchased upfront space on http://www.goto.com/. A search on the term vacation rental or vacation rentals, will place us in the front page and near the top. I will attempt to keep us there. **** Note: If you check it out, please don't click thru if possible, because its 23 cents a click. Which doesn't sound like much but it adds up. b. I will continue to submit individual pages into the main search engines as they come in. This helps all of us. c. I have purchased a new url domain name, this will eventually be redirected to the info-asyst.com/iasvaca site. The intention is to make it easier to send folks to your site. The name of the url is www.onlinevacation.com. Mind you this will not replace the url path you currently use, it will just be in addition to that if you choose to use it. By adding this redirect url to the mix. We can then start submitting this domain to the main search engines, and have twice the chance of being hit. I will be sending you another message when the changes for the redirect begin to come thru the pipeline. d. I have also begun looking a affiliate programs. As you may see at the bottom of the state pages, there is a new smart click banner. In return, we have the IAS banner being displayed on other sites as well. Just another way to gain visibility. We will continue to find new ways to make us one of the most visible vacation rental sites. I have already noticed results from these avenues have already produced an increase in hit counts. * New for you a. I would like to begin getting businesses onto the state pages from the various segments of the state you represent. In that regard, if anyone refers a vacation related business to us, and they purchase a one page ad (50.00) you will receive 25.00. Or if you prefer, you can apply the 25.00 towards the 50.00 maintainence fee for your next annual period on IAS Vacation Rental. If you do choose to receive the 25.00, we will mail out these funds once a quarter. Overall, this help all of us on IAS Online Vacation because their business page will then be submitted to the main search engines and they will have a banner link to the vacation site. Which of course increases our visiblity. b. I would also like to remind you that you should be marketing your web page on the net as much as possible. It is the future. If you see places you would like to place your ad and can't fiqure out how to do it, please feel free to email me with your questions. You should also have your url listed in convential ad media, For those who aren't doing it yet for their site in IAS, they should wait until www.onlinevacation.com is fully attached to our site, and use that. Former customers will have the option of using the current url or the new one. c. In regards to upgrades to existing sites. Before the year is out I would like to add to all full page sites (not listings) a vacation date planner and a guestbook form, with auto responder. To keep the chaos at a minimum. These will be added when a site owner renews their maintainence, or acquires a full page site for 50.00. I hope this year is a good one for all of us. I will try and push our site out into the forefront of private vacation owner on-line rentals arena this year. Thank You Al McHugh Date: 24 Jan 1999.