"Visit Great Ocean Road" government tourism website

Geelong Otway Tourism is a government tourism body charged with promoting the four local tourism regions of 'Geelong', 'The Bellarine', 'Surf Coast' and 'The Otways' in southern Victoria, Australia.

This area includes about half of the celebrated Great Ocean Road. This touring route is a major tourism drawcard and has had its own official website for over 10 years, however due to the way the road crosses two different major tourism regions it was decided that the approach of a single site was no longer working.

GOT (Geelong Otway Tourism) contracted Choc Chip multimedia to build a new website to provide tourism information and represent the member businesses of the tourism association by giving them prominent pages on the site.

The new site is located at www.visitgreatoceanroad.org.au

Site Build and Data Feed import

This project was undertaken in two main stages.

Stage 1 - Placeholder site

During Stage 1 the previous Great Ocean Road website was still running and our new site had the purpose of building some content and reputation so that on changeover there would already be a base site ready to take over when the old site was taken down.

This lasted about two months, during which time we developed the main theme for the new site as well as some content convering each of the four tourism regions. The main site was made with Drupal but at this time we had member listings incorporated using a dotnet system that was adopted from the previous website. This system was less than ideal but allowed a continuity of representation for the members involved during the crossover time fromt he old site to the new.

Stage 2 - Main site content and member pages

Stage two started when the original Great Ocean Road website was dropped. At this point we were able to reproduce about 250 relevant pages of tourism information from that site on ours.

The harder challenge in stage two was to incorporate pages and listings for the tourism association participating members, with data being collected from two different external sources.

The first of these is ATDW (Australian Tourism Data Warehouse) which became GOT's preferred partner in providing membership information.

When a tourism business becomes a member of GOT they have the option of obtaining a website listing with ATDW. This means that their information is guaranteed to appear on visitgreatoceanroad.org.au but may also appear on other sites that draw from the ATDW database.

We had some challenges working with ATDW that were due in large part to the system being relatively new. At an early meeting we were told we were the first tourism association in Victoria to be using the atdw database in this way so would be setting the benchmark for future sites.

The most frustrating problem with the feed was that some fields were missing that we required for categorising the members into the different local regions and for showing as details on their full pages. The most important of these problems have been overcome with the help of both ATDW and Tourism Victoria, with communication to resolve some outstanding issues still underway.

The ATDW feed is checked every night and changes or new members are imported automatically.

The second source of membership listings comes from GOT's in-house database of members.

This uses a MS Access database to record all members, not just those that have opted in to a full website page. All members of GOT receive a free 'line listing' in the appropriate category on visitgreatoceanroad.org.au, meaning that their contact details appear on the quick search results pages but they do not have a full page listing.

We developed an importer so that GOT staff can manually export their database to xml and upload it into the website. The script then updates the line listings automatically.

Search Engine Optimisation

A major consideration for this project at all stages, both during site build and ongoing, is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

The main purpose of this site is to give the tourism businesses that take part as much exposure as possible, with the goal of giving them as much or more exposure than the old site did.

This was quite a task given that the old site had been operating for over 10 years, had a Page Rank of 6 and received over 30,000 organic visitors a month during peak season.

Our SEO campaign involved a range of techniques including link building, online press releases, news stories and more. Major landing pages for each region and key terms were also identified and SEO-friendly copy written specifically for these pages.

However, the on-site techniques that Drupal allowed provided a large advantage over the old site which had been built with very little SEO in mind, most likely due to its age.

• Clean markup - Drupal's valid and (mostly) semantic markup means the site is far easier for search engines to interpret. The original site did not even use h1 tags for page headings.
• Clean URLs - having key words in URLs is not only better to read, but makes sense for search engines. Our quick search results pages and membership pages all use taxonomy and page titles to create clean URLs, which beat the old site's member.aspx?id=HH232G3234234 syntax.
• Specific landing pages - We have specific landing pages for each region and some important key phrases. The ease of adding these pages and inserting them into the navigation structure makes Drupal awesome for content management.
• Breadcrumbs and menu links - being able to specify the words used in breadcrumbs and menu links is great for both SEO and usability.
• Meta tags - Google may not take much notice of the 'keyword' tag, but the 'description' tag is still useful and Drupal has a great module to allow easy editing of these.

Other Advantages to Drupal

Roles - Using Drupal's core user module we made 'editor' and 'administrator' roles so that regional tourism bodies can elect an editor who can log in and change or add content for that region, while GOT itself has representatives who can act as site administrators.

Theme flexibility - We are using different themes for specific landing pages as well as each sub-page of the different regions. We use taxonomy to specify which page loads which theme.

Views and taxonomy - Using views for our 'quick search' pages means that it was very easy to set up, with each results page showing members based on the taxonomy terms they have assigned.

Contributed modules - We used a host of contributed modules to help achieve the functionality required, including Views 2, CCK, Imagecache, Pathauto and a few other usual suspects.

Here are some of the other modules that have helped with this site:

• Nodewords - Used to apply editable 'keyword' and 'description' meta tag fields to pages, for SEO purposes
• Page title - Allows the page <title> to be different to the <h1> heading, for SEO purposes
• XML sitemap - creates a sitemap in the XML format read by Google and other search engines
• Nodequeue - Can be sued to create lists of nodes, we are using this for the feataured adverts in the left column
• FCK Editor - For giving editors a wysiwyg
• Date (with Views) - The Calendar part of the Date module lets us easily create calendar-style views of upcoming regional events
• Webform - used for the enquiries forms
• Backup and Migrate - creates automatic backups of the database, important as we have editors regularly changing site content
• Path redirect - In the changeover from Stage 1 to Stage 2 some paths no longer existed so rather than have these 404 we redirect them to a relevant page
• Menu block - gives us control over the sub-menu in the left sidebar
• Menu breadcrumb - Makes the breadcrumbs for our pages match their place in the menu heirarchy
• Login destination - Used to send editors to the main admin screen when they log in, instead of the default user profile page

Also Admin and Vertical Tabs which have become staples to make administration easier.

Challenges

The major challenge with this project was with incorporating the data from the external sources as mentioned above. However, there have been a swag of other challenges along the way that we have managed to learn from and solve in one way or another.

IE6 compatibility

Of course this is the bane of every web designer's professional life, but in this case we had the added problem of drop-shadows that we had created using transparent 24-bit PNGs. An IE-only override in the style sheet now loads flat images without shadows - it doesn't look quite as good but at least it's not 'broken'.

Views 2 lack of documentation

Bringing our custom data into views meant creating some code for the date fields to make sure they could be used for display and dating events correctly. This was hard to do, not because of the code itself but because the documentation for Views 2 is very thin and unorganised.

We figured the wrinkles out but in the process also discovered that Views 2 does not handle DATETIME strings without modification, a major problem when trying to show calendar events from a source over which we have no datatype control.

Multigroups in CCK

On our main information pages we allow editors to create as many 'features' as they like, usually at least three. Each of these areas can have a headline, body text and image and appears in a separate section at the bottom of the page, for example as seen on the Geelong Shopping page.

To allow this functionality we are using CCK multigroups with the fields displayed through a custom tpl file. This is not a part of the current CCK release but can be found under development in the CCK 3 branch.

Theming forms

Form API is great for producing a simple form but it is not easy to produce a form that looks good, even if the fields are relatively standard. We have found limitations with this on several of our sites. It is sometimes simply impossible to create the code required to match a well-layed-out design proof.

Conclusion

The base system that Drupal provides contributed in a large way to the smooth completion of this project. While there were some hiccups, the time Drupal saved us through its core systems, APIs and contributed modules far outweighs the occasional headache.

For more info on Choc Chip multimedia visit www.chocchip.com.au