After many months of work I'm proud to announce my latest project HertzFlyDrive.com. This website was designed from the ground up provide Hertz with a more effective way to manage their car rental booking information and help speed up the booking process for end users.

This site has a lot of new features in it that I had great fun with including Linq to XML for the XML calls to Hertz, jQuery UI date pickers, a brand new jQuery expander made specifically for this project, contacting the database using JSON and jQuery, multiple languages, etc. The list of new tech on the site is nearly endless! I'm proud of the speed of the site compared to their older site considering all of the extras we have added to the forms. By comparison our new site loads roughly twice as fast as the older Hertz site.

It's not only raw speed that helps the end user experience but also the ease of use of the site. We rose to the challenge and set about making the site a breeze to use for users. Our new car selection page actually combines two processes in one. On the old site the end user was required to go through to two separate pages for booking a car and picking the accessories that they might want. On our site this is all done on the same page. We have also included a very nice clean way for the user to upgrade their car choice without forcing them to go back a page and forward again. Steps like these all help speed up the booking process for end users and provide a much smoother experience.

It's in the admin tools that we've really gone to town with features. There are loads of snazzy extras we've built into this system. With the old site that Hertz had there were no stats for bookings or facilities to update offers on their site. Our brand new admin tools let Hertz quickly and easily add/update/delete/order any offer for any country and/or language.

There is also a brand new email marketing tool built for this site that allows admins to send and track emails sent to customers. The emails sent can be stored and stats like number of opens, click throughs or completed bookings from an email message are all store in our system. Customers can opt out of the email marketing at any time and there is even an option for them to easily opt back in if they decide to change their mind later on.

Finally, we have provided Hertz with enough stats to keep them busy for years to come! Everything from 'how many child seats were bought?' to 'whats our most popular destination?' is available to the site admins.

We're hoping that this new web system will help drive more sales for Hertz and that end users find the site a joy to use. I'd love to hear what you think about the site so let me know in the comments below.