The new Website

The New Website

The main difference between the previous version of The Cruise Line's website and the new one is that visitors to the site should find it much easier to use.

The layout is much better and you can use the "Search" facility to look up information on just about anything. For example, if you were to type "black watch" into the search, the system immediately scans through a massive index and lists all the results in order of what it deems to be most relevant to your search criteria, looking at all articles containing either "black" or "watch".

Details about our Major Cruise Partners are all easily found by clicking on any of the logos at the very top of the page.

Do let us know what you think of the new site. There is a competition to enter where we invite you to give us your comments for a chance to win £100.  Enter Competition Here  

Cruise Offers
  Cruise offers such as on board credit, free flights, or complimentary upgrades are denoted by a gold star on homepage offers, and in BLUE when you access the details of the actual cruise you are interested in.

RSS - Get the news and information about your preferred cruise line delivered to your desktop or reader.

Another exciting feature (that has in fact been available on the web for a number of years) is RSS. RSS (Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web, but who don't have the time to find the content that interests them by trawling through a website to find it. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually, and you ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.

Also coming soon: "MY CRUISE PORTFOLIO"

Visitors to the site will soon be able to create their own pages on the site using "MY CRUISE PORTFOLIO" .This will allow you to publish your own cruise reviews, upload images from your cruise, and create pages that not only remind you of your best moments on board, but also tell us what most interests you.

This is known as UGC (User-Generated Content). It is all the rage on the Web today. Some of the most recognized Web brand names to emerge over the past two years, including MySpace, YouTube and Facebook, are based on UGC. They are the most visible and best example of Web 2.0services. The element that all UGC Web sites have in common is providing users with the tools and forum to present their own content on the Web. This will mean that you will be able to have your very own page on The Cruise Line's website. It will allow you to post comments about any cruises you have been on, your cruise photo's, interact with other members who are online and effectively create your own Cruiseline Profile.

CSS

The new site also makes use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. It's most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

CSS can be used locally by the readers of web pages to define colours, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.

The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).