As promised last week this post is an introduction to some of the thinking behind our pre-Christmas launch of the new Adventure Tours beta website. I say it is a beta version as we have really only launched the framework to which so much is going to be introduced including the much awaited travel planner.

The whole idea behind the Adventure Tours website was to simplify the user experience, make it easier for them to find the information they wanted and to understand how tours could be combined to create packages - or purchase prepackaged combos. We also wanted to bring a lot more inspirational photography into the site as it was thought that experience of the trip was poorly conveyed on the last site.

In redesigning the home page probably the most important concept here was to simplify everything. We use a technique called spearfish shopping to highlight the tours that are most popular at a particular time of the year. Adventure Tours runs some quite sophisticated analytics and analysis so they pretty much know what tours should be selling at what time of the year etc and therefore focus these featured information on those products. The “ads” down the right hand side are direct promotions for internal pages and can be used to highlight tours or products that there is a special on at the time or that is selling below par etc.

The flash map that works as a secondary navigation was developed by our friend Davis Hammon at Rising Tiger Media in the US and like everything on the site is in first release. There are plans to continue to develop this map with most, but still simple, information.

The individual product pages are really the key to the success of this first release. The tour highlights at the top of each tour are designed to speed up the decision-making process for the user. It is felt that visitors to the site sort of have a list of things they really want to do on our tour in Australia and that by showing them quickly which tours contain these things we are making it easier for them to make decisions without wading through the itineraries.

The flash draggable map at the bottom of the itinerary is the first launch of the dynamic map which will be the backbone of the Oz Experience website. There is a huge amount of information that is going to be built into this map in the coming weeks, particularly with destination information and hopefully some imagery.

Finally, each individual page is completed with popular packages and add-ons, which are designed to make it easy for customers to understand how they can combined tours or use pre-made packages.

Has the site been successful so far? Well, that’s the best bit - in the first 30 days sales are over 20% above all previous records!! Likewise, the feedback from International travel agents has been very encouraging, for example; “On behalf of the Copenhagen office at MyPlanet, I am writing you because I want to praise you for the new website, I think it is very nice looking and friendly to the eye.”

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!!

So, on my way back from a great time at the Adventure and Backpacking Industry Conference in Sydney. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like I gave my best presentation ever - probably aimed the content a bit too technical and never got a grip on everything. Plus my leg was exhausted but that stage and my good leg would not stop shaking with the weight.

You can download the presentation, plus the extra bits here, which hopefully will make sense more.

One thing to make a comment on - in my speech I gave the throw away comment that Chris from Hostel Book had worked for me in Europe - since discovered same name, same relative age, both in Poland - but different people!! Sorry about that.

The actual conference day was great and really good speaking line up. Claire Hatton from Google followed me up and I asked her about duplicate content as per my earlier post this week. She confirmed that she would expect that sites could get devalued if it was perceived that their content was duplicate and that larger more established sites (e.g. Hostel World, STA etc) could be perceived by the Google algorithm and being the originator based on their age, size, ranking algorithm etc. It is essential that travel companies rewrite their content when they are syndicating across numerous travel sites.

Another big announcement for us today! We have put the Wayward Bus Beta version of the website live today.

This is a cool site and includes amazing banner images by Chris Cooper. As I posted earlier when we released our new logo look, Christ has been working in the Xebidy studio doing some illustrations for the new Xebidy website - I know, I know - its’ coming (and so is Christmas)!

No amazing new features in this website yet, except for the inbound RSS feeds on the home and community page which are being fed via our XEFEED functionality and cleansed for relevancy.

Next step, travel planning, more community elements, fancy booking engine and so on.

We have finally got our Bootstrap demo up and running for all to play. It seems that whenever time was made to work on it something else would come up and we just did not have time. Nonetheless, here it is.

Feel free to login to the CMS and edit the content, create pages etc. The content is set to reload completely every hour.

Bootstrap is simply an interface change for the popular Silver Stripe content management server. The core of Silver Stripe is completely intact and Bootstrap can easily be added as a module. In fact, we are looking for developers wanting to get involved in helping us make it into a more off shelf open source module for all Silver Stripe users.

http://demo.xebidy.com

Well, its’ about bloody time some of you may say. But the first purely Xebidy designed website is live. The Park hostel in National Park.

This is one of the best hostels in New Zealand - evidenced by the blog stories we keep picking up. They might only be small guys but they certainly have an amazing product.

For this site we tried to bring the warmth of the atmosphere into the site - they have two huge open fires and being nestled in National park have stunning mountain views and a unique alpine feel. I have been lucky enough to have been there twice visits - once involving too many bourbons and an incredibly wrong decision not to jump into the spa pool with the Stray bus load of English girls after an eventful night in the National Park tavern - my wife is happy though.

Since then the guys have developed their own house bar and cafe which I am told is a roaring success for a chilled night in and a few quite ones (how many still end up in the spa, hmm?)

The unique things to look out for on this website are the inbound feeds from travel blogs around the Internet that feature The Park hostel. These travel stories are picked up by our Xebidy XEFEED product which is continually scanning all forms of social media including photo and video and video sharing sites, blogs, forums and review sites and feeding them back to a central server where we go through them sorting for relevancy and refeed these back to the website. Any criticisms or bad press can be picked up very quickly and sent through to management where they are immediately dealt with.

We also have a comments section on the site where guests are encouraged to leave their comments. We intend developing this further to produce a cool guestbook for reading of the comments - watch this space.

The site is built completely on our Bootstrap content management system (based on the awesome Silver Stripe open source platform) - which, if you have not heard about yet you must be in the dark ages! Have a look at Davis giving a seminar on it here.

Finally, we have linked the bookings part of the website to The Parks property management system, Starfleet. Our friends at Starfleet have integrated the booking engine so that it interrogates their database for availability and then populates with the booking - no need for endless double handling.

So, there you have it - a cool small site - lots of work to do on content to keep if fresh and happening but a site we are proud of as our first one purely designed and developed by Xebidy. We have retained a marketing contract with the guys at The Park and hope to do some really cool stuff over the next 12 months to get to the top of the search engines and lots of bookings!!

We talk a lot in onsite optimisation about the code to content ratio. The advent of CSS has meant that any code associated with styling the way the website looks, from the size of your font and headers to how the actual site is laid out, can be removed from the web page itself and held in a separate file. This has led increasingly to a belief that less code and more content on a web page will lead to better search engine rankings.

The reliance is therefore on the web developer to produce an optimised site - one that makes best use of CSS to remove inline styles from the web page etc. But, the job is half that of the developers - there is a huge responsibility of the website content manager too. A responsibility it would seem to me they are often unaware of.

Most of the sites I have seen in recent times are built on content management servers - it is pretty much the norm these days for good websites. But what this means is that the content managers enter their own content. No problem most are usually trained by their search engine marketing companies (or suss it out through their own research) on the importance of the keywords in the content etc. But what I have discovered recently is that very few have any regard for the tidiness of their content as code. Such examples that continually pop-up are the use of a break tag <br /> within a heading tag say <h1> - this serves no purpose, but to add code to the content without changing the look and feel. Similarly, a break before a closing paragraph tag - same effect, nothing! And the other one that is really painful is the excessive use of a non-breaking space ( ). Sometimes, they are necessary (such when adding paragraph for line spacing to make a particular page work in the content manager - but often they are not - and they only serve to increase the code to content ratio.

A little hint to avoid too many non-breaking spaces in your content: two spaces after a full stop in print documents; only one space after a full stop in web documents.

Much of this happens because content is copied and pasted either straight from one web page to another or directly from Microsoft Word. I advise all my clients when entering content that if they are not writing it from scratch straight into the content management servers themselves then paste the text into notepad first and convert the format it as plain text - which strips any formatting, before pasting it in.

Over the last four months our team of long-haired, pierced, low-riding, caffeine-fueled developers have created an awesome CMS that we’re ready to show you!

Branded ‘Xebidy Bootstrap’, the Xebidy team have taken the award-winning open-source CMS - Silverstripe - and added advanced functionality that provides you, as the website administrator, functionality to easily drag and drop components into a number of preset layouts to create any page you desire.

Today I’d like to show you a video created a month ago that shows what we’ve been working on.

In a few days we’ll have a demo install of Xebidy Boostrap 1.0 ready online for you to play with.

We love open-source so much that we’re releasing Xebidy Bootstrap 1.0 source code to Silverstripe and the open-source community, and hope to see our work one day integrated into Silverstripe CMS. Check back in a few days for a source code release.

I spent the day yesterday with my mates at Base Backpackers finalising the go-live beta version of their new website as well as looking to the next few months advancement of the site. Xebidy did not design the site but we developed it onto our Bootstrap content management server which is based on the Open Source Silver Stripe CMS. The most exciting is probably the next 12 months however when Xebidy will be working with the guys at Base to develop the functionality into a new world with lots of great Web 2.0 features planned - I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag just yet; and also the implementation of an extensive Internet marketing plan that was authored by Jonathan Dixon at Xebidy.

One of the cool things about this project is the courageousness of management and foresight with respect to this project. A few weeks ago I posted about a real world web 2.0 dilemma we were facing on the project; in which we are taking automatic feeds of reviews and ratings from the independent Hostel World website and displaying them directly on the Base website. As I said while the reviews were not really that bad - there were reviews that you might not want to display on your home page necessarily. Nonetheless, it was decided that these reviews would be displayed regardless, unedited.

Base understands the importance of word of mouth and that in order to compete and achieve their objectives of being the best hostel/budget accommodation in Australia and New Zealand they simply have to provide the best possible product. A message has been sent out from head office to all hostel managers that the reviews and ratings will be considered as a measurement of success and that managers should strive to improve their ratings and address reviews head-on. Further a policy has been put in place to address any negative comments head on so that they are either turned into a positive or more importantly that the issue is taken on board, that if possible they are rectified and that the users are communicated that this has been done.

It will be great to monitor the reviews and ratings over the next 12 months and see what impact this positive attitude has. I am easily betting that all the Base hostels ratings will improve by at least 5 -10% (which is a lot when you consider they are already consistently the top rating hostels in their cities) over the next 12 months through both a positive influence on the ratings and review medium and also through increased focus of the manager directly on the feedback from their customers.

It’s going to be a great 12 months and I will keep you informed as we introduce some of the new functionality and rework the site - taking it from the soft beta launch it is today to the full functionality user-centric site that is planned.

It is kind of the unofficial launch day of our new logo and overall look. Thanks to our visiting illustrator Chris Cooper we have finally got a look and feel and feel that we hope will stay with us for many years to come. The original Xebidy logo and website was designed by me in Portugal and was really a stop gap representing where we were at that time. With 7 crew on board and lots and lots of projects well underway it was high time that we also stepped our own image up a grade.

I say it is the unofficial launch as although the illustrations are all finished we still have some way to go to complete the redesign and development of our website. We did however, get new business cards today - so it is impossible to keep things under wraps - and therefore the unofficial launch. Expect to see the logo replacing old ones in emails, letterheads, project documents etc over the next few days.

But, if you are expecting a nice corporate image - think again! Chris has a pretty unique style and he has created something that is, well, pretty out there to say the least. As I guess you can tell from this post - I am proud as punch.