It has taken what seems an eternity – the last 2 weeks being held up by an SSL Cert, but finally the new Oz Experience website is live! I will break this post into 2 parts – today being an overview of the functionality and tomorrow being an introduction to the travel plan.

When I first looked at the Oz Experience project in October 2006, we came to the hypothesis that it was in fact the sum of its parts that were more important than the product itself. By this we mean that it was the destinations that the bus went to, the activities along the way and the places to stay that were more important to the travellers experience than the actual bus pass itself. To present this on the website meant a complete change in the way we were selling on the web.

Over the following 6 months, we created a strategy that looked to emphasise the destination, activities and places to stay rather than just the bus pass. We broke every bus route down into the short hops travellers liked to do (where they hopped on and off the bus.) We then mapped these onto a Google map. Making the Google maps actually move along as the bus route is traversed with next buttons was quite a challenge.

In the backend, we created a page in our content management system (Bootstrap) for every product, activity, destination etc and then added extra data editing fields where we added geo-code data, descriptions to appear in roll over boxes on maps and relationship tables to map accommodation and activities to a destination which is subsequently mapped to a bus route.

In order to tie everything together, we devised a set of icons that are consistently used throughout the site.

With recognition that the customers were now basing their purchase decision on which bus passes they wished to buy (or even more to the point whether they chose Oz Experience over competitors) on the destinations they wanted to visit, we looked to bulk up the destination information. The first area is by adding random images taken as RSS feeds, from Creative Commons searches of the destination rather than using the standard marketing stuff. The second area and probably the coolest was to offer Oz Experience access to the Travel Generation destination guide data. Setup as a wiki, Oz Experience customers can read and edit destination information on the Oz Experience site without leaving that site but from a much larger pool of content being collected and moderated on Travel Generation. Travel Generation content now extends to over 125, 000 users per month with the Base website also drawing and adding to the content. The integration into these sites uses the media wiki API.

The backbone of the whole website is the travel planning software, known as My Oz Ex. I will walk through the functionality tomorrow but the main jist of it is that while a user traverses the website, they add destinations, things to do, accommodation etc to an itinerary builder. From the bundle of products they select as wanting to do, a recommendation engine then suggests the best pass to buy that suits the customer’s itinerary.

This is such a cool site that there really is too much to talk about here, but some of the other things are:

• One of the first sites in the world to use the chromeless You Tube video API. You will see that the instructional videos throughout the site are not in your normal You Tube frame but have our own speech bubble border and controls. It is using the You Tube API to receive the video ‘chromeless.’ It looks simple and really effective – but it’s really cool and we are one of the first sites in the world to do it.
• Use of Sifr which uses flash to convert text headings to non-standard web fonts which maintaining the search engine readability of the headings. It means that the headings throughout the site look great but are still search engine friendly.
• Use of a content footer throughout the site to assist the user with cross-navigation. At all stages, bus passes are recommended that match the page content as are things to do and previous page visits tracked.
• The booking engine is linked real-time into the Response reservations system API.

That will do for now. I could probably talk about this site forever so if you have any comments please let us know. In the meantime, many congratulations to Bruce Thurlow who is leaving Oz Experience at the end of this month and certainly leaves them with a great asset as his legacy.

We have in the past month or so been migrating many of our clients away from our XEFEED product to Google products. I don’t know how good this necessarily is for our product, however, Google is just simply better, and they have a few more developers working on their stuff than we do.

XEFEED was developed as a feed reading/Internet monitoring service. We used it in a number of ways to scan the Internet for stories, blog posts, new articles, even images and videos etc about particular companies. We then monitor those masses of data for our clients looking for bad news that needs to be dealt with and simultaneously we develop strategies around this (see my posts on Oz Experience bad news).

In many cases we took this data a step further and re-fed it out to our client sites in the way of comments (Base) and independent travel stories (Wayward Bus, The Park and Backpacking Queensland). We use XEFEED to receive a whole host of data and then go through accepting or denying the information based on relevancy. In this way instead of simply displaying the feeds directly on the sites we are able to remove any spam or porn site links etc.

In all cases we are still offering this service, however, we have now set all this up using Google services and in particular Google Reader. Google Reader can handle hundreds of feeds which we can quickly scan for relevancy. We then tag the information we want with relevant tags and pick up the RSS feed for those tags displaying them on the client websites. We are even doing this for random regional images from Creative Commons (Oz Experience) and Videos from You Tube, Google Video and Truveo etc (Base).

One of the other advantages of using Google Reader instead of our own XEFEED product now is that we can use multiple accounts. XEFEED was our own product and was designed to be run in-house and in this way it did not have multiple users and the interface was not the most friendly in the world. Using Google Reader however, we are able to give alot of the power of deciding what is shown on the websites back to the clients - this will be particularly relevant in multi-company sites such as Backpacking Queensland where all members will effectively be able to control their own content (we are in the process of updating all these feeds now).

So, what does this mean for our XEFEED product. Unfortunately, the end of the software - but fortunately no-more development needed. We still offer our Internet monitoring services which continue to be as popular as ever. This service is in fact even better as it is transparent with the client who can log onto the Google accounts we set them up with and actually see the data themselves there too. We have not stopped developing and we have still setup a number of feeds that go into Google Reader from sites that don’t have RSS so as we can capture the necessary data - I guess this is a big asset of our service.

At the end of the day - I guess you have to say argh Google, we do love you!

If you don’t know by now we design and develop great websites (hic).  But great design and lots of cool functionality doesn’t necessarily maketh the website - it’s a cliche, but it’s true - content is king.

The content is one of the most important parts of the website and often its ignored, given to the intern to write, or cobbled together at the last minute.  Or even despite all the strategy, planning and conceptualising there is always a mad rush at the end when a few pages were left out and content is produced ad hoc and jammed into a page that does not fit it.  Unfortunately, this only serves to leave a sour taste for your website visitors and worse risks turning them away.

There are three simple rules that you can follow to make your content more appealing to your visitors:

1.  Use of headings

User don’t read websites, they scan them.  Use good clear headings to help your readers quickly identify with your content and product.  A major word of advice, drop the “Welcome to our website” heading - it is so 1990’s.  Instead state what your company does, or better still use a ‘big fat claim’, such as lose weight in 21 days or top rating hostel in Bundaberg, to draw your customer into the page.

2.  Me, I and We

It’s great to tell your web visitor what your company does, but at the end of the day they really want to know what’s in it for them and how do they get it.  Rather than focussing on your business focus on the benefits to the user.  The idea is achieve “written visualisation” with your content, that is, content which helps your visitors see why they should product to get the maximum benefit - “buy x services and your marriage wil last forever” or “use bleach for a whiter brighter smile”.

3.  Keep it Simple Stupid

It’s cool that you have new 24 seat Mitsi Fusos - but no one really cares.  Joking aside, ignore the technical specs of your products and focus on the benefits.  In fact, I remember from Kiwi Experience days that it always said in the brochure - our buses have big windows to look out and big stereos to cruise to (or words to that effect).  That sort of stuff really works!

I have been on a plane today flying from Queenstown to Auckland on my way to a Backpacking Queensland committee meeting in Bundaberg to take up a newly appointed role. Firstly, New Zealand is a stunning place - lots of fresh snow on the Southern Alps and Mt Cook looking as majestic as ever in the clear blue sky. Nonethless, I am pontification; and that is not the purpose of this post.

In between staring out of the window I was reading an article about SEO and came across this interesting statement:

Don’t put too many links to other sites (on your site). Links out lower your pages’ importance

Somehow this does not quite sit right with me and I thought I would throw it out for some comment (Andrew?).

I have written about the importance of links before and my understanding is that a link to your site from another site (or vice versa) is a vote of confidence for that other site. I believe Google looks at the content of a web page and tries to ascertain the relevancy of that content for your particular subject. Links from similar pages help indicate to search engines that users think this page to be relevant.

Now inbound links are obviously strongest - a link to your page from a page of similar content will increase the value of your site and its position in search results. An important point is that links from pages of dissimilar content will not be regarded with much value - if at all, therefore getting a link on someones link page is pretty much useless.

Second reciprocal links are some value, but nowhere near as high as one-way links. Google and other search engines deprecate the value of reciprocal links as generally they go against the whole idea of links being a vote of relevancy for the content on the web page. When it became obvious of the importance of links in search engines tere was a mad rush to get links - the “you link to me and I will link to you” mentality. It didn’t take long for Google to work out that this wasn’t the idea and to quickly devalue reciprocal links.

So what of outbound links? Well I believe that the backbone of the search engine algorithm is the concept of linking and that if having outgoing links lowered the value of your site the whole search engine rankings system would be undermined as everyone would stop linking.

Instead well used outbound links that provide your users with links to other web pages of complementary content are adding to your website as a resource and increasing your search engine value as your page is recognised as being more relevant for your particular area.