It has been 5 weeks since my last post due pretty obviously to the festive (read drunken) season. We are also waiting on a new design for the Xebidy website to come out of the US and while we had hoped to have it live by the 15th January it has been held up - so rather than hold off anymore best I just get straight back into the swing of things as I have so much to say.

It has taken me nearly an hour this morning and go through and moderate all the spam comments that appeared on the site over the break - nearly 300. That does my head in and I think one of Google’s highest priorities this year should be to stop sending it’s ad-sense network to sites that are nothing more than thinly disguised spammers. It does my head in the continual bombardment and when you visit the site you find nothing more than a bunch of Google cost per click ads.

So, we actually finished 2007 on a bit of a mad rush and in all the haste I did not really get time to talk about everything we had going on. For starters we launched a new website for Fletcher Living at Jacks Point. This was not so much a new site for them as we simply took their old site that was developed in flash and developed it purely in HTML on our Bootstrap content management server; which is much better for both search engines and users. Obviously, we will be looking for a dramatic improvement in traffic this year from this site and we have undertaken a year long project to improve this traffic, sales and content on the site.

We also developed the site for Waiata Lodge, a new luxury lodge being developed on Queenstown hill, onto our Bootstrap content management platform. This site was designed by our mates at Fluid and we simply put together the code for them. Hopefully, we will continue to work with them this year on this.

Finally, in the heat of the December rush we launched the beta version of the new Adventure Tours website. This is going to be a great site, but it still in very early days. I will explain some of the features that we have already designed into the site later this week as Bruce Thurlow is as we speak winging his way from Sydney to Queenstown to work with us on this and the new Adventure Tours website.

So, what does 2008 bring for Xebidy. Well, we recently launched a cost per click search marketing campaign for our mates at The Park Travellers Lodge in National Park and we will be working with them all year to develop their site for both traffic and content. Likewise, as I said Fletcher Living at Jacks Point.

The Australian Adventure Tours Group, consisting of Wayward Bus, Adventure Tours and Oz Experience still remain core projects for us with a heap of the promised Web 2.0 functionality to got into Wayward Bus and Adventure Tours in the next month and the new Oz Experience website which I think will be awesome to go live early March.

For our mates Base Backpackers we continue to redevelop their site and have been introducing a new look and feel to some pages slowly. I won’t make too much noise about this yet as we have a long way to go and are working on some pretty exciting stuff which should come to fruition int he coming weeks. Needless to say , congratulations to the team at Base for their three new hostels (2 acquisitions in Brisbane and 1 brand new one in Taupo ) which they sneaked in before Christmas.

Finally early 2008 has Xebidy undertaking a few new projects also, in particular the launch of the Swuzzlebucket Advertising Network which we will make a big song and dance about in the next week or so, Travel Generation in about 6 weeks and the very exciting Breathe project, which we have been quietly (if we can do anything quietly) working on for some time and should see a sprint to the finish in March. There are a few other cool projects and I am looking at a few interesting strategy projects also with some high profile companies - so without letting any more out of the bag. Let the year begin in earnest!!

Tags: News, Xebidy clients

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 8:42 am and is filed under News, Xebidy clients. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.