This project is the brainchild of Greg Zammit from Adventure Tours and is an amalgamation of over 25 Australian operators to produce an awesome 90 page brochure for the European market. By all accounts the brochure which was launched earlier this year has been a roaring success and we hope this site follows suit.

At the moment only agents can book online using the recently launch Tourdesk product from Respax. It is expected that we will integrate a customer booking interface with Respax next week and hopefully then in the next few months Xebidy will redevelop the booking interface using webservices.

In it’s first incarnation the site is pretty much a replica of the brochure but over the next few months new content will be written for an Internet selling perspective and also new functionality. The target market is a slightly older market so we have not gone for the more Web 2.0 functionality that you see on sites like Base, Backpacking Queensland and the new Oz Experience site (coming next week).

A big thanks to the crew in the office here at Xebidy who have pulled some really long hours getting all the content into the site. It was a really hard site to work out navigation, content and design as there is a huge amount of information and each product is so vastly different. I think they have done a great job.

Click here to check out Australian Adventures website.

Last week we released a new look and feel of the Base Backpackers website and it looks cool.

The site was given an upgrade in February but was in beta and we added more functionality last week. Some of the things we have introduced are:

• A cool accordion menu that Mat developed in Javascript himself
• Latest photos feed from Flickr
• Magnetic Island Full moon Party booking engine
• A new map
• New comments section that allows us to pull comments from a variety of sources including Hostel World, but also other sites and blogs. We run the blogs through our XEFEED product which can filter the comments for relevancy
• A news section to track all the news media for each of the hostels
• And, some updated content

The site is still in development and Xebidy is contracted to continue development through to late in 2009 so expect lots more things to be released soon - in fact, we have some cool You Tube video scanning and destination wiki stuff coming in the next month that we will announce soon.

On a serious note, however, the Xebidy SEO and Internet Marketing team has just grown by two more.  Joaquin joins the crew after recently graduated with a “Credit of Honour” in a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  He focuses on a lot of the technical side of Internet Marketing, data-mining, analytics, CSS and HTML; plus a very thorough marketing background.

Emer on the other hand is a bit of an old hand with a B.A. (Hons) Degree in Communications Studies from Dublin City University and a Masters Degree in Public Relations & Marketing with Advertising and Event Management from Fitzwilliam Institute in Blackrock.  Emer has previously worked with two leading new media companies, Athena Media and Digital Audio Productions, both in Dublin.  Here she was involved in a host of media production suchas weekly radio shows and podcasts and online marketing such as e-Zines.  Emer researched and produced a National PPI Award winning six-part series on Computers and Internet for RTL, the Irish State Broadcaster.  Emer has been in Queenstown for a year now working with the cast of the new Wolverine movie.  (And even better her partner is the manager at our favourite bar!)

We are really happy to have these guys on board and have searched for ages to get people of this caliber into this team at Xebidy.  I am a bit late in getting this post out as both have pretty much settled in now and are running rings around me (more time to blog though)!  Please feel free to ring either Joaquin or Emer for a chat at anytime they have some pretty interesting ideas on the whole marketing area and are already building up new strategies for existing clients that I am really excited about.

What a great day it is!

Silver Stripe has been working for some time on their release of version 2.2 and today Gally completed the integration of our Bootstrap drag and drop platform to that version. Currently we have upgraded only a couple of sites - all which are in development as opposed to live, but we expect to roll out the full version over the next few weeks.

• Some of the upgrades that the new system handles are:
• Much better drag and drop of the site tree menu
• Much nicer looking interface
• Way better handling of uploading and managing images
• A to do list on every page and then a report to identify what needs to be done
• Advanced security settings such that user access can be restricted to certain pages
• Page version history to see what changes have been made with version rollback
• Integrated basic analytics
• Search functionality
• Batch actions to delete or publish multiple pages
• The ability to save and publish a page at the same time

As you can see I am pretty excited. I spend a lot of time working in Bootstrap alongside our clients and just the look and feel upgrade has given me warm fuzzies.

We had to do a bit of development work to bring the Silver Stripe version 2.2 alongside our Bootstrap module, especially as we are using Prototype version 1.5 and Silver Stripe still uses 1.4 - but it seems we have got rid of any bugs as we don’t seem to be getting any Javascript errors etc.

The one bit of development work that we were hoping for from Silver Stripe was the language translation tools. This is pretty major but was broken in the Silver Stripe release. It is an important element for many of our clients so we will look to fixing this in the next few weeks ourselves and will release it back to the community.

For now though Bootstrap version 2.2 is out. We have not upgraded the demo on this site yet, but will do soon. In the meantime test the old demo here and feel free to contact us if you have any queries about Bootstrap and want to have a proper look and play with it.

The lack of posts last week is a direct outgrowth of how busy we are here at Xebidy.  Things are going along great and we have many projects bubbling away under the hood and new features being added to our current live sites almost daily.  For example, at the end of last week we launched a Wiki component that integrates into the Bootstrap CMS using the MediaWiki API.  MediaWiki is the same platform that Wikipedia is built on.  Look for its’ first use in the new Oz Experience website for destination information.

The increased workload means that we are currently recruiting and have three positions available to join the team.  The first is for a developer with PHP and Javascrript experience (PHP 5 preferable).  The second is for a front end designer/developer who must be able to demonstrate very good XHTML/CSS skills and  preferably with Flash and Actionscript experience.  If you want to play with all the latest Open Source technologies and have lots of scope to do cool shit while working in a fun relaxed environment then contact us.

Finally, we are looking for a marketing chick (but you don’t have to be a girl) to join in the office where the real work is done.   This role is extremely diverse, but obviously with a heavy focus on Internet Marketing and executing some of the Search Engine Optimisation strategies we work on.  There is real opportunity to apply your own creativity with some of the unique projects we have underway including a massive magazine publication.  Journalism experience or training would be very welcome.  There would also be some administrative support to the MD.

We are cool fun to work with - love a drink in the sun on Friday (well any) afternoon  - and have a flexible powder policy.

Well, as you can see the new site is launched - this was completely unintentional. I was supposed to upgrade Wordpress to 2.3 so that we could enable tags for the new site and have the tag cloud at the top of the page, which you will see manifest itself. Unfortunately, the new version of Wordpress made the old site look all over the place and it seemed like it was going to take me a month of Sundays to fix the mess. So, with so much outstanding to do on this site, and with all the real web boys busy on proper projects, I opted to put the site up as is and try and get it going as soon as I can. So for those of you looking at the site right now, that is the story, the blog posts are still there and as you can see I have been active there this week. The normal selection of articles will be back soon and the rest of the functionality resolved in the next few days also. Maybe we can have a glass of bubbles then; bit premature now!

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!!

As promised we have converted the news clip that features the Backpacking Queensland website. Once again thanks to everyone for the support and the great week last week - I hope to see you all in February.

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.