Webvertising Lets Users Book Hotel Rooms In A Flash

Webvertising, a Houston-based Web site designer and developer of Internet solutions, used Macromedia Flash MX, a rich Internet media-creation application, to create a one-page interface that makes the reservation process a snap.

"About five years ago, we were asked by a hotel to develop an online reservations system for them," said Jim Whitney, founder and CTO of Webvertising. "The system we developed was so successful that the hotel was able to book $1 million worth of business in the first year."

Today that system, dubbed iHotelier, is a hosted service offered by the ASP subsidiary of Webvertising. The application boasts a licensee base of 350 customers, including Downtown Disney Hotel, Comfort Inn, Quality Inn and the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York.

"We originally built the system three years ago on the Macromedia Cold Fusion platform with an HTML front end," said Whitney. "About one year ago, we started working on a flash user interface that allowed us to reduce the user experience from five pages to one."

The single-page user interface, called OneScreen, allows users to plug in different variables to choose rooms by type, date or rate without having to follow the more linear, multistep process used in some online reservation systems.

"Flash was the only software we could find that would allow us to create this multivariable, one-screen form," said Whitney. "It allowed us to get past the limitations of HTML and create a more logical interface."

Flash enabled Webvertising to build a more interactive, intuitive interface that can be used with HTML and makes the transfer of data between the interface and the system much more fluid, Whitney said. "It gives the user a desktop application-like experience on the Web," he said.

Added Mike Williams, associate Flash product manager at San Francisco-based Macromedia: "Building Web applications with Flash was a trend that we saw growing with our release of version 5 of the software. We encouraged this trend so that developers would realize the full potential of the application beyond making motion graphics and animations."

Through the ActionScript scripting language, Flash can surpass the limitations of HTML and dynamic HTML and offer Web application developers a more feature-rich development environment.

"HTML was never designed to provide the functionality in the browser to build e-commerce applications the way that Flash can," Williams said. "A lot of the browser scripting that is required to talk to the server in a client/server Web application is easily done with Flash."

For solution providers such as Webvertising, the trend toward Flash-based e-commerce applications opens up a wealth of opportunity, said Williams.

"Flash makes it easier to bring the fluid desktop user interface experience to e-commerce Web sites where multiple forms are needed," Williams said. "Webvertising's OneScreen application shows that Web-based Flash user interfaces will make e-commerce sites more approachable and more profitable."

And while Flash will certainly help Web application designers create more user-friendly e-commerce sites, it also holds value for sites that are purely informational, said Williams.

"While Flash does lend itself to POS Web sites such as iHotelier, it can also be used for non-POS sites because of its broad application possibilities," Williams said. "We have data that shows that 96 percent of people accessing the Web have some version of Flash Player on their computers."

In the meantime, Williams is optimistic that solution providers developing POS and point-of-purchase Web sites for their customers will look to Flash to get the job done.

"We've been contacted by a number of major customers who are developing dashboards for financial-services Web sites," said Williams. "And they're looking closely at Flash for the development of those solutions."