I.+Site+Definition+and+Planning


 * Introduction:**

For the Final Project for LIS 654-4, Information Technologies course, our group decided to create a blog to help undergraduate and our fellow colleagues in the New York City area who are on a limited budget find affordable vacation spots within a five hour radius of the city. Thus, 3Thrifty Travellers was conceived on March 10th, 2010. The group consists of P. Vega, V.Thomas and G. Zeidner. The division of responsibilities for the project is as follows: P. Vega will analyze the site's definition and planning, target users, purpose of the website, and find sites with a similiar content and purpose. V. Thomas will design and build an architectural model, create a flow chart to show a web hierarchy and explain the directory and file structure. G. Zeidner will work with the site design, describing each page content, interactive features and site construction. Finally, all three members of the group will work on the usability evaluation and future plans. In the end, it turns out that the assigned responsibilities were changed as we progressed with the creation of the blog.

After a few attempts we have decided on creating a blog to inform undergraduates and our fellow colleagues in New York City area who are on a limited budged fine affordable vacation spots with a five hour radius of the city.
 * Purpose:**

Our target audience are students in the New York City area who wish to travel. The student aspect is key, because this really limits the budgets that our audience will have. We have to talk about places that are relatively inexpensive. This includes cheaper lodging, places to eat, sights to see and travel arrangements. Since we are targetting students, we have also set a limit on how far away these locations can be. We have set a 5 hour driving radius for New York City. While we may not have places that are that far away yet, it will be in our future plans to add them. There are a number of places within this radius that are not very expensive to visit. It is our hope that students may be surprised to learn of these places, and keep coming back for more tips.
 * Target Users:**

We will be using Wordpress.com to build the blog and Wikispaces.com to write about the construction of the blog.
 * Resources:**

A similar blog to ours is Tim Leffel's Cheape$tDe$tinations blog ([]). However his blog is more concerned with world travel, as opposed to our locally based travel destinations. The Frugal Traveler blog [] from the New York Times is also a world travelling blog. WorldHum [] has the best travel stories worldwide.
 * Competitive Websites:**

Another blog that deals with cheap travelling is CheapOAir's blog, found at: []. This blog is created by a travel website CheapOAir. Many of the links on the side of the blog direct you to their main website, where they try to get you to book your vacation through them. We are not selling people anything. We also face competition from websites such as Expedia or Travelocity, which people can use to find cheap places to stay in varous cities. We would also give cheap destinations and places to eat.