Home → Arctic Reservations → Guest-Facing Site → Guest Facing Site Basics
30.1. Guest Facing Site Basics
Arctic offers two implementations for guest-facing sites. The first and easiest to manage implementation is to embed the guest-facing site into an IFRAME on your main website. The IFRAME implementation ensures that your guest-facing site design is always in sync with your main website because all design elements come from your main website. The IFRAME implementation requires your main site to have an SSL to accommodate the transactions that will be processed through your embedded guest-facing site. The IFRAME setup requires one page setup to embed the entire guest-facing site into a single page. You can *also* embed specific landing pages on other pages of your website to guide guests directly to booking pages related to the page they are viewing. This lends a lot of flexibility to the deployment of your guest-facing site.
The second implementation uses a subdomain to host the guest-facing site. With this implementation, you will select a subdomain name where your guest-facing site will live and have your hosts do a CNAME entry on your domain to point the chosen subdomain to Arctic's servers. If this implementation is chosen, we will do an initial site design import so we can skin your guest-facing site with the design elements of your main site. We only offer the initial import so any future design updates will need to be done by you or your web designer using the built-in tools we provide for guest-facing site management. This implementation is less desirable because it can be easy to forget to update your guest-facing designs when changes are made to your main site. When the two are out of sync the seamless feel is lost and guests may become concerned they are no longer on your site.
We recommend the IFRAME implementation but both options are currently open for you to choose from.
Once you decide on the implementation you wish to deploy for your Arctic guest-facing site, you will then need to decide on how you want to funnel guests to your guest-facing site and how you want the booking interface to work. We generally recommend focusing your sales information on your main site helping guests decide which of your tour options they would like to book and then once they have made their choice transferring them to the relevant booking page in on your Arctic guest-facing site so they can complete the reservation process.
This method is illustrated in the next section of this chapter. As you work to choose your preferred implementation and make a plan for integrating your Arctic guest-facing site into your website, please feel free to contact support with any questions. We are always happy to help.
IMPORTANT: If you are currently using a subdomain guest-facing site deployment and wish to switch to an iFrame guest-facing site deployment, please be sure to contact support BEFORE proceeding so we can guide you through the process. There are steps that support must take to be able to transition your guest-facing site deployment smoothly from the subdomain guest-facing site deployment to the IFRAME guest-facing site deployment.