The launch of the new “Web 2.0″ style Austrian Tourism website has really grabbed me. It’s simple and clean – exactly what you would expect from something Austrian – almost clinical in it’s efficiency. Yet, it also has personality and best of all it does all the little things absolutely perfectly.

Showing simple menus

I think the first thing that grabs me is the less is more approach to the menu – everything is very very clean. There are three obvious options – discover, plan, or search and book. Clearly, to me that is exactly what you would want to do on a tourism website, yet most site designers – me included – have multiple menus breaking things into regions, travel tips and so on. The “Plan” menu then has a sub-menu that categorises by the types of trip you might want, such as wellness, adventure, food and wine and likewise the “book” menu breaks up by accommodation, transport and things to do.

There is one other menu item which leads to the section of generic travel information about Austria etc – but this is sorted of distanced from the main three items and in a different colour, therefore does not get in the way of the rest of main purpose of the website.

The main content on the home page is sort of blog-like in it’s presentation with a top-tip and then 4 highlight articles pulling you into the website. It is a lot like we tried to do with the Backpacking Queensland website with the six lead stories on that home page.

Something that immediate catches your attention is the tag cloud in the top right column. Where the main navigation might appear sparse it is more than adequately made up for with the tag cloud which clearly states the key areas within the website to visit. The tag clouds seems to be purposefully manufactured as opposed to user generated which I do not have a problem with; some may see this as break some sort of unwritten tag cloud rule though. Within the site the tag cloud changes to reflect tags that are going to be related to the section you are in – so for skiing you get tags such as Innsbruck, Alps, and Arlberg.

One of the most fun parts of the website however is the discover section. Two sliders allow you to select whether you want inspiration from nature versus culture and tradition versus innovation. Select an adequate combination of the two and an inspirational full-screen image appears. You can keep scrolling through more images or change you preferences say for more innovation and nature.

In my opinion this is just cool. At the end of the day it is the inspirational photos of a country that is the best way to sell a destination and I think that so many tourism websites are bogged down in the content over the amazing photography that most destination marketing bodies actually have at their disposal. The Austrian tourism website hits the nail on the head and the slider preferences mean that you see the types of images that are going to inspire you. It is not just about the photos it somehow almost talks to you – “why type of photos would you like to be inspired by Mr Roberts”.

This is a really well made website and one I will certainly be stealing some ideas from. I guess it is like everything in Austria, cleans, stunning and very effective.

The Rainforest Group in Franz Josef consists of three separate brands on a massive property. Our job was to create three websites that shared the same Rainforest brand but were independent for their respective markets. The colours for the three brands (Rainforest Retreat, Rainforest Holiday Park and Rainforest Backpackers) were all set in stone because they are entrenched in all their marketing collateral, and although they are quite different the idea was to make the sites obviously as part of the same brand – i.e. the same.

The booking engine used is the Site Minder system which has a single back office for maintaining lots of different third party websites as well as your own.

There is still a lot of work to be done on these three websites as the Rainforest guys were short of images – but a photographer is down there now, so we hope to see lots more very soon.

If you don’t know by now I love Twitter. I actually don’t tweet that much but the 100 or so people I follow regularly share links or interesting stuff that I find relevant almost everyday in work.

Yesterday Darren Rowse of Problogger was attending a Search Engine Boot Camp in Melbourne and live twittering – I grabbed these four quotes which I thought summed up web development (and indeed the outlook on things we have here at Xebidy):

• “most people when they do site redesigns dump their sites and lose all the learning they gained from the previous one”
• “why site design fails, poor planning, no customer centric architecture, upsidedown design with content last (it should b 1st)”
• “people come to your site with a purpose in mind – understand what that is and deliver upon it & you’ll have a successful site”
• “A blogger can have more influence than a major brand has over their own brand online” – Jason West

And yes, I do think Twitter is effecting my blogging as I spend less time reading my RSS reader and more time being in the moment following links shared by those that I follow on Twitter – supposedly guided by their relevancy! It means that I am doing less personal writing and more spur of the moment quick commenting. You can always follow me on Twitter @xebidy

So Google has released it’s own web browser (Chrome) – and all us web geeks simultaneously went yeehaa (as opposed to Yahoo!) and argh, another bloody browser to test everything in. But what I have realised talking to “normal” people is that most don’t give a toss and just don’t get what it all means. So here it is – browser wars in laymans terms.

Why do websites look different in different browsers? Why do you geeks all promote Firefox? What’s wrong with Internet Explorer? Why should I care?

These are all extremely valid questions for an everyday user, someone who probably spends at least 50 to 60% of their day on the Internet without really having a handle on the method to their usage. Sure, they are apt at Facebook, have 3 or 4 different email addresses which they check in Outlook, Gmail and some still Hotmail heaven forbid, and in the majority spend the rest of the time surfing the Internet for information whether it be for work or otherwise and probably go to their favourite newspaper website once or twice a day. These people “use” Google – “we trust Google” – they type their desired URL into Google search instead of the browser and so on. These same people use Internet Explorer (IE) already pre-installed on their PCs.
So what is in a browser for these people? Let’s ignore the security debate – that is, those that say your data is more at risk from getting pinched by cyber criminals using IE than any other browsers. It’s one of those debates that should be avoided around most tables in my opinion. But instead focus on why the geeks prefer Firefox, say, over IE.

It all started way back when there were two browsers competing for market share, Netscape and Internet Explorer. in the early days each sought to gain more market share by introducing better and better features that website developers could use to make their sites look better – firstly, there was font variation (italics and bold etc), then there were gimmicks – flashing text being my favourite. The problem was that what one browser did the other did not necessarily do meaning that a site might having flash text if you used Netscape but none in Internet Explorer. A nightmare for developers who thus promoted one over the other.
Along comes an organisation called W3 (World Wide Web Consortium) who put together web standards – these are standards with which a web browser interprets code and renders a web page. Here is the most important point – that the primary job of an Internet browser is to take the website code and read it, turning it from text to actually a pretty page. That’s what an Internet browser does – without a browser a web page would have no medium to be rendered in. (Try opening a website in word or excel – it looks like mumble jumble). So, when the Firefox browser rose from the ashes of the failed Netscape browser it immediately adhered to those standards. However, for Microsoft this was not that easy – the Internet Explorer browser was developed on what we call quirks and just dumping them undermined a lot of its legacy code. And therein lies the problem, as more browsers were developed they followed the web standards, while IE even through its many incarnations was left languishing with lots of proprietary rendering methodology. For a web developer this means the use of hacks to make a site render in all browsers in a similar way – whereas a piece of code may work in one browser it can be rendered completely different in another. We have lots of terms for them – the box hack, an issue with margin and padding in IE, for example.

So, when Google introduces another browser that follows web standards we Geeks are happy because it means that there is one more avenue putting pressure on the developers at Microsoft to make their browser more compatible with internationally accepted coding rules. Better still Google is big! The likelihood of everyday users converting to Google Chrome from IE is much higher than the likelihood of those same users choosing Opera of Firefox – after all “we trust Google”!

Unfortunately, it is not that simple and Microsoft don’t appear to be in any hurry to make a complete jump to a pure web standards based browser. For example, as we know Internet technology is moving at a blinding pace and cool stuff is developed nearly everyday. Canvas for example is a technology that makes dragging things around your screen very easy – unfortunately IE does not support this and has indicated that they are not going to in the foreseeable future. The losers here are the general users, less easy to use user-friendly functionality!

But as an everyday user why should I care about all this anyway – isn’t it your problem as web developers to make sure my site looks good regardless of the browser I use? The answer is yes! But, let’s look at what you do get from a browser – the rendering of a web page – and this is why you should care!. One of the main ways a browser competes for market share is in the speed of its rendering engine, that is the speed with which it displays the web page. Firefox is fast – Google Chrome so far appears really fast – it makes your page come up quicker. This alone is reason enough why you should switch to alternate browsers – so that we can make more richer experiential websites because the browsers support them.

The other area with which browsers are competing for market share is in their “plugins”. That is, in the functionality you can add to your browser to create shortcuts to everyday things etc. Firefox leads the way in the number of plugins that can easily be added to your browser such as shortcuts for saving your favourite content, sharing it, uploading your photos and videos and so on and so on. It is inevitable that Google will follow suit. One of the main reasons these plugins have proliferated here instead of IE is the openess with which these browsers publish the code saying how they work – they actively encourage developers to develop the plugins themselves by publishing how the browsers work.

But unfortunately even though I have tried to make a case for why the everyday user should choose a browser other than IE it still all sounds like geek-speak. For the everyday user another browser no matter that it is bought to you by the most famous name on the planet is irrelevant. Despite the fact that the jump from IE6 to IE7 was extremely relevant in terms of Microsoft moving toward a more web standard browser 35 – 40% of all IE users (75% of overall users) on the websites we monitor still have not upgraded – in fact one very large, very major NZ business (and Xebidy client) said to me recently “we will probably just jump from IE6 to 8 – don’t see the point in IE7″. In all hope, however, the release of Google Chrome will force other browsers to up their game with regards to adopting newer Web standards and features to stay competitive. Which at the end of the day will mean we can can make better and better websites with richer user experiences.

From my preceding post on our wonderful experience in Mount Cook building the new Travel Generation website I have done some more reading about the concept of “flow” in website design. According to Chicago University Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “CHICK-sent-me-high-ee”), a great website is created not by navigating through content but by staging a complete experience for the users. Csikszentmihalyi explains this experience as a finely tuned sense of rhythm, involvement, and anticipation known as “flow.”

Flow is an “intense emotional involvement” and timelessness that comes from complete sensory engagement of immersion in any particular activity, created by the here and now. Marketing specialists like Vanderbilt University’s Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, propose that in website design flow is “a central construct when considering consumer navigation on commercial websites.

So what does this mean for a user? A website that achieves flow would draw a user in for the sake of the website activity alone. The users time would fly; they would move effortlessly from action to action without disrupting their thought pattern. Creating a website like this entails creating a story or path that the user will follow. Most websites on the other hand give the users the choice to pick and choose their own paths. The problem here is that they may never find their flow and therefore leave the site prematurely. Most sites assume the user knows what to choose.

The Oz Experience website we launched last month has flow. Early on in our analysis we realised that the customers did not know what bus passes to choose, they did not know exactly where they wanted to go in Australia. Instead we broke up the passes, mapped them onto Google maps and created a path that the user can travel along, following the route of the products, selecting destinations, hostels, and activities along the way to create their own product – but never falling out of flow. We are enticing the user into the website and leading them somewhere (to making a travel plan and purchasing a pass) through the labyrinth of choices.

Oz Experience works – we are getting over 10 new travel passes created a day – some of them very detailed. The average time on the site is up around 10 minutes; and of course sales are going up as less users are abandoning the site without a least the commitment of making a travel plan. Notably, many users are returning and purchasing their bus passes after making their plans. Oz Experience is definitely a website with flow!

From a business perspective, and the success of the Oz Experience website, the creation of flow is only as good as the milestones along the way that transform the random path into a traverse of the website into a goal. We have built a hierarchy of milestones, with little goals (such as creating and saving you travel plan, scheduling your data and so on) that build toward the most meaningful milestone of making a purchase of a buss pass through the website.

Finally we actually reward the user for getting themselves into the flow and in fact add stickiness to the whole story. As the user builds up their basket of destinations, hostels and activities we “recommend” the bus passes that best fits their consumption bundle – we are rewarding them for making choices and similarily continuing to guide them further along the traverse to purchase. The Oz Experience website is not naturally easy to immediately navigate, in fact, it slightly challenges the user – but that is part of the seductiveness – it draws the customer in and then once within it’s walls it overloads their sensors moving them easily from action to action. In this case the flow is the glue that is turning lookers to bookers for Oz Experience!

I have been working on the Travel Generation design, and those that know about the project will know a how much it means to me. Anyways, I came across an interesting list of how a non-designer should think in order to have a designer point of view. The list is actually 50 points long and is part of designer Karim Rashid’s Karimanifesto but here is the top .

1. Don’t specialise
2. Before giving birth to anything physical, ask yourself if you have created an original idea, an original concept, if there is any real value in what you have disseminated.
3. Know everything about your profession and then forget it all when you design something new
4. Never say “I could have done that” because you didn’t
5. Consume experiences, not things
6. Normal is not good
7. There are three types of beings – those who create culture, those who buy culture and those who don’t give a shit about culture. Move between the first two.
8. Think extensively, not intensively
9. Experience is the most important part of living, and the exchange of ideas and human contact is all life really is. Space and objects can encourage increased experiences or distract from our experiences
10. Here and now is all we got

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.