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.

An interesting email came across my desk the other day about some well-known guys in Australia that have been launching a number of new sites promoting Northern Territory travel.

The interesting point pertained to how long a new URL exists before it gets’ any decent Google rankings. Our URL at Xebidy has only be going since February and we have only just gone up to page rank one after the recent Google page rank shuffle. Not exactly a meteoric rise - but it is not something we ever working on.

The interesting thing was that these guys had given themselves at least 8 months, citing the middle of next year to be when they would start to be up the rankings. I personally was a bit surprised by this speed - a bit quick in my opinion. But these guys are good and they do have a huge amount of websites to leverage off.

Then again we also know that Google looks for sites owned or operated by the same web masters etc and discounts the value of their links etc. So perhaps they are being optimistic. I am intrigued to watch.

It is of more interest for my own two pet projects, Breathe and Travel Generation. Both are new URLs and both are due to be launched early in 2008. How long will they take to have any impact on the search engine rankings? 12 months perhaps.

Best we follow out own advice and start comprehensive Internet Marketing now!