Comment by ihavetoblog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ihavetoblog | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well, the embassy section is the most developed part of the entire site as it is the oldest. Most of the date is kept up-to-date in terms of contact information for the embassies and we have a widget that provides visa information for free.

The widget will also take you to a service that will help fill out your visa application and deliver it. Their fees depend on the service you require.

I also constantly email all the embassies/consulates in the database for updated information because, and many people don't know this, embassies/consulates in smaller countries are usually the house where the ambassador lives. So when they change (and they often do), so does all the contact info.

That's awesome. Your embassies page is quite good.

You could make it even easier to navigate by adding a map.

Instead of listing by embassies in a particular country, you should list by embassies of a country. To give you an example, if I'm thinking of going to France, I'm looking for the French embassy's website, not where I am applying from. That second bit of info is also needed, but you could ask that in the second filtering stage or by guessing the user's location.

By map you mean a generic map with clickable countries to take you to the embassies of that country? I'll consider it. I'll have to see how size would play into the visible area of the page.

I have tackled the embassies in vs embassies of on the listing and quite frankly, I don't have enough points of reference to make a call. There is a nifty search box on the right that allows you to filter though

If you get a lot of visits to that section, then you could A/B test to choose which is the better way.

A simple alternative I could think of is to get rid of the list of countries and make the search form on the right the main interface. You only need to ask "where are you going?", "where from?" and "your nationality". Simple search boxes or dropdown menus with flags would be great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com