We recently upgraded the look and feel of the Base Backpackers hostel pages and introduced a feature we had been developing for awhile (those who have seem the Adventure Tours Australia website would have seen it before) - that is, the displaying of images onto the website that sit on Flickr.

The idea here is that we take an RSS feed directly from our these pages and then display the most recent 20 or so images. This works fantastic for a company such as Base which has 14 hostels across Australia and New Zealand and a continually growing mountain of images that are taken almost daily by staff, customers and friends.

A lot can change in a week in a hostel and there is just so much going on from regular parties in the hostel bar to activities and local events. By using a Flickr account we can give access to all the hostel and bar managers who can easily update their photos in real time without the need to continually go back to the website content manager to get new photos. It keeps the images fresh and gets everyone from the crew to the customer buy in - hey that’s me in the bar the other night!

I have said this before in my articles etc, but Flickr also provides a parallel marketing medium. For example someone looking for images on Magnetic Island on Flickr might come across Base or the Full Moon Party and subsequently be enticed to investigate Base Magnetic Island hostel as the place to stay.

We are currently in the process of extending the functionality such that we also pull in the description and tags of the images as they appear on the Flickr site and are displayed on Base, Adventure Tours etc websites.

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 two weeks since I posted - but in all honest truth we have been so unbelievably busy. We have had a visit from Bruce Thurlow from Adventure Tours and Oz Experience for the past two weeks as we approach the final run in to the new Adventure Tours website as well as three websites going live - being Backpacking Queensland, Fletcher Living at Jacks Point and Waiata Lodge.

As most know the launch of Backpacking Queensland was drastically delayed by issues with hosting which are now thankfully resolved although Michael Gall had to do a last minute complete reprogramme of the Silver Stripe manifest builder to cop with the lower availability of memory on the host.

Anyway, today I want to address an email I received from Simon Gehert regarding Backpacking Queenslands’ new site and use it as an ideal opportunity to introduce you to some of the things we have done for the site. I quote

“Rarely have we seen something more obviously shoehorned into existing technology where it shouldn’t be. Take an open source CMS you didn’t develop complete with tag clouds, social network site links, unrelated blog headline feeds, google maps etc ,which was never intended for this purpose, add some crap interface design, a link to your site in the footer which says “Well made in New Zealand by Xebidy … and you have all the makings for a car crash of epic proportions.”

So ripping into it, for those that don’t know, the content management server that we develop on is based on the Silver Stripe platform. We didn’t develop Silver Stripe we just use it; and have greatly extended it. We chose to use Silver Stripe on this project (and most projects we do) because it is Open Source and we firmly believe in an Open Source philosophy. From a client’s point of view they get the code, the get a system that anyone can develop, and when the have moved on from Xebidy they can theoretically go out to any web developer and continued to get the system supported and extended.

Using a proprietary in house system restricts the website owner to that development company; if the company no longer drives the CMS development the client is inevitably left high and dry with a system they have outgrown and no one to support them. The Internet is moving so fast at the moment that you need a system that keeps pace with these changes, in-house systems inevitably are developed using clients’ money - if a client wants a feature then they pay for that to be developed in the CMS. In an Open Source environment many developers from all over the world are continually developing the system and trying to make it better for themselves and then sharing those advances back to the users. The system evolves faster and inevitably better. Take the example of the manifest builder in Silver Stripe; one of its’ weaknesses has always been the way it compiles all the PHP code when the site is first called - it uses a larger amount of memory than most hosting companies are happy to make available. When Michael Gall redeveloped the way the manifest builder worked to be used on the Backpacking Queensland host the first thing he did was put it back out to the development community, apart from being met with enormous cheers, he suddenly found himself with a huge amount of debugging help as everyone looks to incorporate it into their projects and into the main (trunk) system.

Silver Stripe is not the only Open Source content management system in the market, and is in fact in the whole scheme of things, a very small system; but there were a number of other factors in our decision making process. Firstly, it is developed in PHP5 which is quite a step up from PHP4, it is more structured, which suits a lot of the Java contractors we have had on board, and in our opinion is future proofing the development for some time to come. Secondly, at the time of choosing Silver Stripe it had recently been accepted for the Google Summer of Code which means Google sponsors a handful of projects across the world to have their projects developed under Google supervision - we thought this was a great tick of acceptance for the system. Thirdly, Silver Stripe actually provided a good framework for the guys to develop a lot of the other stuff we do beyond just the websites; such as our travel planner which is developed completely inside the framework. Finally, we choose Silver Stripe because it was developed in New Zealand and we thought that being a New Zealand company ourselves and promoting Open Source technologies to so many international clients is made sense to support local home grown that is well run and has a similar ethos.

It looks like this is going to be a long post, so I will break it into a few posts over the next few days and deal with some of the functionality then. But just to close there is one important point to reintroduce about the Silver Stripe content management server. Earlier on this year we undertook a huge interface change to the basic CMS. Having used lots of CMS’s over the years I wanted something in which the user interface and ability to build new pages was really easy and that the client did not have to keep coming back to get more pages developed etc. Xebidy developed the now popular Bootstrap interface which allows a user to drag components (which anyone can easily have developed by any web company knowing PHP) onto a page layout and thus build or redesign pages easily on the fly. This means a site can be easily extended or even redesigned at any point in the future without the massive effort that took place in the last few months with Backpacking Queensland in re-entering all their data. We think Bootstrap on the Silver Stripe platform is something very special and certainly the feedback we are getting from our many clients and the Open Source community says so also. For those interested in finding out more about Bootstrap here is a video of Davis Hammon presenting an earlier version and a demo is also available here.

I read an article a while ago from Forrester Research about moving your business to a design-centric business. This article was concerned about justifying web spend and getting the whole business focused on web design for success. The article proposed that in a design-centric business news of successes in the website are spread across the whole business. It really hit home to me the other day when I was talking firstly with Bruce Thurlow the Online Manager at Adventure Tours and Oz Experience and then the CEO Ken Hart.

I have been working with Bruce for awhile now on their web strategy and recently there has been a host of real successes in the project. For example, following our keyword research we choose to focus on a keyword phrase that took in the terms “holiday package”. Not terms that you would associate with either of these companies, but terms that we discovered are researched a plenty on the Internet. Anyway, since a bit of on-site optimisation and a wait for Google to index the relevant pages, sales of packages have gone up considerably.

It is not the rise in package sales that has surprised me so much, but the lack of realisation by Ken that this increased revenue was a direct result of the effort by Bruce and his team. Most people in an organisation of any size don’t understand the website, or the mechanics of the eCommerce. As such this example bought back the aforementioned article to me that within a web project all successes no matter what size should be promoted by the team responsible throughout the company. Evangalise you successes, tell your company stakeholders, and at the end of the day justify your existence - no one else in the company will.

This is seriously cool!

I was working in the Oz Experience office with Bruce Thurlow the Online Manager for Oz Experience and Adventure Tours when we set up this You Tube channel called 100Adventure. It has only just started but the idea is that users can post their videos of their trip on the Adventure Tours Groups including the newly acquired Wayward Bus. The next step is to start promoting the channel and get some suscribers involved. There is already a huge amount of content that we have found on You Tube covering all the ATA companies and Bruce and his team plan to contact these guys over the next few months to get them involved. Keep you eye on this channel it could be the beginning of big things to come.

I also know a cool secret about a wicked competition coming up from the team at ATA and TNT Magazine regarding You Tube, Flickr and a whole host of user generated content and free travel. Watch this space it is set to be one of the best things I have seen in Web 2.0 application to tourism business ever.