Travel

Things You'll Need

Design your comparison website. The specific design details for your comparison website will depend on the product or service being compared. For example, a luxury car comparison website may only have a few dealers to compare, while a book comparison website may have dozens. These details will drive the design of your website. Also, think about how you'd like for visitors to use your site. Come up with a site design that will provide a good experience for your visitors. In general, the site design should include a layout with information about what the product or service is, which merchants are being compared and the price (or other product or service aspect) offered by each of those merchants.

Gather price data. Price data can be gathered manually or automatically. For manual price data gathering, visit a merchant site and record the price or other aspects of a product or service for comparison. Obviously, the manual approach will only be practical for comparisons of a limited number of merchants and items. For large numbers of items and merchants, automatic price data gathering is crucial. Many large retailers, such as Amazon.com and others, offer price data in formats such as XML or CSV, which can be read by a computer program and used to update a website.

Update your pages. Once you have obtained updated price data, you can update your web pages. The update process can be done manually or automatically, depending on the number of items to update. For a manual process, you can simply edit each comparison page to include the updated price data. For an automated process, the price data can be processed by a program and stored in a database, which can then be used to dynamically generate the comparison web pages. Large comparison websites typically use the automated, database-driven technique.

Publish your comparison website. Once your pages are created or updated, you can publish them to your website. In a manual website, you may simply transfer updated pages to your web server. For an automated website, you may transfer or update the production database being used to generate the "live" pages being seen by visitors.