As you may have seen, our latest site tenerife.co.uk was launched publicly with a very nice article on tnooz.

Almost a year after acquiring the domain and about 8 months since we started working on it, it’s always a great feeling when a site goes “out there”.

As explained in the tnooz article, the aim of the site is to provide more in the way of information for our visitors than the price-orientated sunshine.co.uk site, while leveraging the domain to rank well in the search engines.

Acquiring the domain

Early 2009 I was having a chat with Frank Paul about buying some holiday related domains to re-invest some of our profits from the previous year. As a man with all the right contacts, he very quickly arranged a deal with the then owner of tenerife.co.uk and majorca.co.uk, two of our biggest destinations.

How much you ask? Each was a substantial five figure sum is all I have to say on the matter!

Holding page and logo

As there was no content on the domain, we quickly had Caboodle Design knock us up a logo (similar to the sunshine format) and added a holding page. Not the prettiest, but it did the job.

Expert

Last July I started the hunt for an “expert” on Tenerife. Here’s how you advertise for such positions in the current social media age -

and here’s how you apply for said position -

After a bit of internet research, I jumped onto Amazon and ordered Andrea’s [Andy's] book, but was already convinced she would fit the bill and more from reading her blogs.

Within a few weeks we had a plan of action and I even met up with Andy for a chat while on holiday in Tenerife in the October.

Logo Concepts

Michelle at Caboodle Design was tasked with creating logo concepts for tenerife.co.uk, and as usual she produced some great logos. We’d already been down this path with majorca.co.uk but we wanted something that was specific to Tenerife.

Extending the brand

After a few weeks trying to decide which logo / colour scheme to go for, we had a brainwave. KISS! We decided to have all the Geo sites match the main sunshine brand, much easier in terms of design and development (we’d just acquired tunisia.co.uk that week), and importantly getting the brand in front of our visitors whichever site they visit.

Having spent a few weeks going back and forward with Michelle over the Tenerife concepts, she was very understanding when we told her we weren’t going to use any of them, she promptly made us the logo above!

Design & Development

The search and booking process is entirely taken from sunshine, so all the site needed was the front-end content pages designed and developed. Or so we thought.

Working with our local expert Andy, we quickly realised (well, she pointed it out) that most sites don’t accurately reflect the location and breakdown of resorts and hotels in Tenerife, generally lumping everything into “catch all” resorts like Costa Adeje. Since we wanted the site to be “right”, we had to develop a whole new level within the site’s architecture compared to sunshine.co.uk . Fun.

Here’s an example – Costa Adeje has all the hotels and “mini-resorts” contained within, like El Duque and Fanabe which also have their own page with the hotels in their locale.

As you can also see from these pages, one of the USP’s of the site is the side-by-side descriptions, contrasting the typical Travel Agent blurb with Andy’s rather honest descriptions.

Content

With the front-end starting to take shape, we concentrated the efforts of our Content Team on Tenerife, making sure we had every possible accommodation from all of our suppliers, checking all the current information we had was up to date and writing descriptions for the hotels and resorts.

Jack

Our resort level pages seemed a bit bare. We wanted to add some pictures but the only images we had were of hotels. As luck would have it, Andy’s husband and co-author Jack is also a damn good photographer.

He was tasked with visiting every resort and mini-resort we had and taking some nice pics! The results look great on the site and you can really see how good they are here.

Launch

Tenerife.co.uk actually “opened” about 3 weeks ago, but we kept it quiet while we did some final testing and let the search engines have a rummage through the site.

With the article published on tnooz marking our “coming out” party, we can now concentrate on marketing the site and picking up some links and traffic (yes you cynics, that’s part of the reason for this spectacularly long blog post).

Today saw the release of a consumer and a trade PR from 10 Yetis, our Public Relations Agency, and they are currently negotiating a nice little PR spot to do with an upcoming event.

Hat Tips

Many, many people have been involved in this project in one way or another, be they paid or otherwise

• Frank Paul
• Caboodle Design
• Andrea & Jack Montgomery
• Stephen Pavlovich
• All the sunshine people involved, you know who you are!
• Kevin May @ tnooz.com for being very patient!

Cheers one and all!

That’s All

I hope you found some or any of that interesting, it’s been a strange development project as we switched from working on majorca.co.uk to tenerife.co.uk about half way through the year.

We’ve also been busy re-developing sunshine.co.uk, which made it harder work to develop the other sites in tandem due to frequent changes. This probably accounts for the length of time involved in this site build, as it often played second fiddle to it’s big brother.

Comments/ feedback / questions very welcomed!

Our new offices are the ground and first floor

Since we started, sunshine has been based in a rented Regus office in Fleet. It was very handy at the time, but we’ve now grown to the point where it didn’t make sense financially. The new office will easily cater for our current office based staff and allow for a lot of expansion too.

First floor

The new offices are right at the centre of Fleet, and most importantly, directly across from a pub with a nice beer garden and just round the corner from Starbucks!

Ground floor

It’ll be a few months until the offices are kitted out and ready for the big move, but it’s nice to finally have some proper roots.

If anyone has previous experience kitting out an office from scratch, we’re open to advice on do’s, don’ts and oh my God no’s.

Oh and kudos to Chris Brown who handled the purchase (which was our 3rd attempt at buying this office) as I’d have lost patience in the whole thing long before now.

This time round I had the pleasure of speaking at one of the sessions, sharing the “Holiday Watchdog Story”. It wasn’t as terrifying as I thought, quite enjoyed it really and hope my audience did too. There’ll be no sharing of the presentation or video online though, you had to be there .

As usual the before and after socialising are part of what makes a good conference and TV was no exception. Having zero alcohol across the weekend was an unusual experience while attending a conference, but I’m happy to report that I still enjoyed myself greatly!

Most of the sessions I saw were excellent, with Judith Lewis probably the best one for most of the audience. Joost just sneaked it for me with a few snippets of info about optimising pages for speed as part of his presentation. Elaine and Dave gave some great insights into the story of AllKids and Childrens Rooms; if this isn’t the type of presentation that’s at a4uexpo I’d have to ask myself why not?

The world of affiliate marketing was better represented at this TV than the first, when the next one rolls around in March 2010 I’d advise you not to miss it!

Well, we have been keeping ourselves busy, here’s a few of the things we’re working on –

sunshine.co.uk

Admin side of sunshine has been revamped to cope with the volumes of sales, customers and staff that we have now. What worked in the beginning hasn’t all scaled properly with our growth, so Alan has been kept busy sorting that out. We also changed some of the technology behind our search system to allow for scalability and spreading the site across more servers too, but again nothing that will show up consumer side really (other than faster searches and an end to small outages due to load).

We’re continually adding destinations and hotels and keeping current information up to date, a never ending job for our content team.

New developments – we’ve bought a few domains to develop into sites, some are in current development, some in hiatus and we’ve even soft launched one of them.

New Domains (all .co.uk)

• airporttransfers
• majorca
• tenerife
• familyholidays

Airport Transfers is soft launched, it was fairly simple as most of the code was already being used on sunshine. Once we’re happy with its full functionality we’ll add more pages and get into some more SEO for it.

Majorca and Tenerife both have holding pages up at the moment, they will be developed over the coming months in a similar fashion to sunshine.

Family Holidays is about 70% done, however it was pushed into development hiatus while we worked on getting AT up and running. Content is still being worked on as I write.

We do have one other new domain/development but I’m keeping it under wraps for now. It’s probably the most exciting for us as it’s something a little bit new in terms of development and channel. It’s also not that hard to find, but I’m still not going to post it here

sunshine.ie

We finally acquired this domain after much wrangling with IEDR. Lots of thanks also to Sinéad Kavanagh (ex AffiliateFuture) for her help in acquiring it. Optimistically we’ll have some sort of site up before next year, but the months are flying past so it may not be that quick!

Golf

A lot of my time at the start of the year was spent on our latest investment / incubation project – www.findthefairways.com – a golf portal. Having spent about a month or so working on site architecture and linking it’s now working its way up the SERPS and producing a promising level of growth in traffic and sales.

sunPress

I’d hoped we might get a major release update done over the summer, but it’s looking more and more like it’ll drop back a few months. There’ll be a post on the sunshine affiliate blog before then to harvest some ideas and comments from users.

Bloody Press

A little gem at the end. In case you missed it, TTG quoted Chris Brown when they weren’t supposed to a few months back and reported our turnover. It wasn’t actually turnover, but since it’s in the public domain you may like to know sunshine.co.uk generated ~£16M of sales in its last trading year, not bad for an ickle online travel start up. What’s the profit on that I hear you say? Heh, no chance.

That’s about all there is for now, not entirely sure it’s interesting to you but at least you know we haven’t disappeared.

I arrived very early at the venue having arrived via the Sleeper and settled down with the delegate pack, mentally marking down which speakers I thought would provide value.

First up was Dennis Turner, Chief Economist at HSBC and I can’t say I was looking forward to a “State of the Nation” speech at that time of the morning. I couldn’t have been more wrong, he was highly entertaining and informative, providing great insight into the current recession but taking the sensationalism out of it all. While he gave indications as to when he thinks the current recession will end he did warn that the effects of personal credit will take a long time to solve.

The other highlights for me were 

• Joel Brandon-Bravo (Frommer’s Unlimited)
• Brian Sharples (HomeAway)
• Graham Cooke (Google)

The panel discussions didn’t really do much for me, with very little audience participation in the Q&A’s, possibly due to time constraints (and that panelists often rambled on for an age )

Overall the speakers that did tick my boxes made the ticket price worthwhile, and I’d recommend next year’s event wholeheartedly. 

After the event we had a couple of hours with a free bar provided by those very nice people at Tripadvisor, then people just seemed to drift away. I’ve often found the greatest value from any conference is in the socialising/networking before and after, it would have been nice to have something more structured for after the event to encourage more attendees to stick around.

We ended up in the hotel bar with Graham Donoghue (Travelsupermarket.com), Gregg Brockway (TripIt), Juha Huttenen (TripSay), Giles Parnwell (Affiliate Future) and Sandra Moore (Tripadvisor). The few hours spent here chatting over a few drinks was as useful and interesting as any other part of the event, if not more so.

Lastly, kudos to Kevin and the team for embracing Twitter at the event, with TV screens around the hall streaming the feed as well as it appearing on the main stage occasionally too. This was used a few times to ask questions of the panels, would be nice to see that used even more next year (You can follow @travolution on twitter too for some great travel and online insights, and some questionable music selections).

Arrived in Leeds, spent 40 minutes arguing with my Sat Nav about one-way streets in Leeds while looking for the Light car park. While checking-in there was an almighty clatter behind me, turned round to see Dom (@thehodge) trying very hard not to piss himself as Al Carlton (@AlCarlton) had just walked into a glass table at shin height. It sounded bloody sore and I’m sure when he sobers up he’ll find some rather nice bruising .

Shortly after a group of 16 TV’ers met in the hotel bar before heading out for a meal. I’ve been going to affiliate events for quite a few years now, so it was kind of weird walking into a crowd and having to introduce myself. Thankfully everyone was very friendly and we were soon joined by Dave and Elaine so I was no longer the only dirty affiliate there! While hanging around here I first met Shaun Anderson (@Hobo_Web) a fellow Scot (who took about 5 minutes to work out I’m Scottish too) and an SEO, for some reason we hit it off straight away, possibly due to our shared nicotine habits.

We headed off to Wagamama’s as evidenced here – then onto the pre-conf venue, the Hog’s Head.

 

At the pub I talked some shit to Dave Naylor (@davenaylor) and Elaine (apologies to both!) , then met a few other TV’ers who’d turned up. For some reason I’m always surprised how many Scots are involved in t’interweb so it was great to meet up with Andrew (@andrewburnett) and Wiebke Burnett (@wiieb), Paul Steven (@NorthSouthMedia) and his business partner James (@ttsjames). Along with Shaun and our adopted Irish cousin, Alastair McDermott (@AMcDermott) we had a great few hours of chatting and drinking an awful lot. When the Hog’s Head closed, Shaun, Alastair and myself continued partying ’til the wee hours and none of us were entirely sure which particular “wee hour” we called it a night. All I can say was it was a legendary night out! OK, Wiebke isn’t a usual Scottish name, she is in fact German and Andrew is also half-Swiss,  but we were still the “Scottish” group!

So the day of the event, hmmm, well, I arrived just as Guy Redwood (@eyetracking) was giving his talk and I was still in the sobering-up process. I’m a bit gutted at missing some of the earlier speakers, hopefully I’ll catch Tim Nash, Chris Garrett (@chrisgarrett) and Al Carlton at the next event. 

Dave Naylor’s talk was really entertaining as well as being pretty informative, it was quite a relaxed structure with people piping up questions as he went along. Loads of good info that makes you think you never want to cross a good SEO (especially one with £15k to play with:) ). 

Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) was the next session I went to, where he gave a great session on Reputation Management. A lot of it is fairly common-sense SEO and pulled in a few new ideas, but he put it together in a really interesting  and vibrant presentation, even for a certain audience member who was suffering the hangover from hell. Tom also takes the “Irony of the Day” award; while throwing around a few analogies in his presentation, the one that stuck with everyone was the Emergency Reputation Management technique of changing your name, suggesting a $50 Thai bride would do the trick. Thereafter he was known as the “Thai-Bride guy”.

After the afternoon break (where almost everyone else went for a swift pint), Patrick Altoft (@patrickaltoft) gave a talk on link building, pointing out where most people go wrong and breaking down links into three seperate categories. It was again really interesting and it was probably the session that struck most with me. I read somewhere today that it was Patrick’s first presentation, if so I’d never have guessed as he looked like he’d being doing it for years. Really good stuff.

Last up was Kieron (@kierondonoghue) who gave a great presentation on Affiliate Marketing, demonstrating a few examples of PPC and SEO that generated sales for him including some screen shots of commission stats that were for the eyes of attendees only. If you weren’t at this one make sure you’re at the next one! Kieron also finished his presentation with a few slides on affiliate success stories, with Elaine and Dave up first, then Holiday Watchdog which was very flattering. Telling everyone at the conference that I was buying the beers, not so good

After the event I headed back to the hotel for a quick nap, then off to dinner with Andrew and Weibke joining the affiliate mob of Kieron, Ray (@befuddle), Elaine, Dave and myself. Lovely Thai meal, although I’m sure we all ate far too much!

Back to the Hog’s Head where numbers had thinned since the end of the event and we spent a few hours chatting and drinking again (I was nursing a pint of Guinness for a very long time). Kieron sloped off very early too, but we’ll forgive him as his presentation was very good and he’s getting on a bit (Happy Birthday mate!). Around midnight we split into two groups, us sensible TV’ers heading back to the Radisson for a few quiet ones and the braver souls continuing the partying in Tiger Tiger.

So back to the hen-party infested hotel bar we squeezed into a corner at the back, and enjoyed another few hours of great chat. I once again failed in my quest as usual last man standing, but the thought of the next morning’s drive was enough to keep me sensible and I went off to bed around 3am.

While I am a bit gutted I missed some really good sessions, I made some really good friends while in Leeds, and the “legendary” pre-conf night was worth it. It was refreshing to be at an event where almost everyone was “new” to me, and I really enjoyed it. Dom, when you sober up mate, it was a great event, I can see it getting much bigger in the future, but don’t make it too big please!

Last thing, my post title… Paul Steven’s business partner James isn’t really into the web stuff, so when Paul was trying to convince him to come along, James remarked it’d be full of fat SEO’s wearing glasses. I was happy to correct him and let him know my eyesight is pretty near perfect!

In keeping with such emails they also provided a few figures on their reach of audience -

Play Radio UK is the largest group of internet only radio stations in Europe and offers listeners a totally interactive experience. Our 971,927.50 UK listeners choose to listen to one or more of our expanding choice of radio stations whilst they surfing the internet. This is your opportunity to reach these potential customers whilst they are already on-line 

OK, now look closely.

Nine hundred and seventy one thousand, nine hundred and twenty seven. And a half! Seriously?

Karen and Carps!

Thanks to all who applied and look forward to seeing you both there.

Being a travel punter again was an interesting experience, so I thought I’d share how I arrived at booking with the particular company I chose. My (and Tweag’s who was coming too) requirements for the trip were -

• an organised tour, safety in numbers
• to include official match tickets
• to include the second test, as it’s usually the decider
• be less than 2 weeks long
• direct flights from London, preferably Virgin

The official Lions website points to LionsTour.com which lists the 4 official suppliers (Official Licensed Operators).

England Rugby Travel - Good selection of tours, a lot of the ones that were on the money for our requirements had already sold out though. The Nyala looked pretty promising and made the short list. However, to find out exactly which flights and hotels were available you had to start the booking process, which was awful. Running on Flash, it had 11 steps if you were actually going to complete the booking! I also had to keep inserting the same info each time I re-started the process.

Gullivers Travel – Probably the most well known (and popular) travel company for rugby tours. The had a good selection of tours, but by January there were only a handful left and they’d added a few new options. The info on the website was pretty sparse, with a pdf of their brochure being the main source of information. Nothing really jumped out as an option for my req’s.

Sportsworld – Their Drop Goal tour looked perfect. Unfortunately again, of the 5 original options, the only two that would have worked for us were sold out.

Thomas Cook Sport – Lots of options, most still available. Each tour option included named hotels and URL’s where available. The website itself is quite sterile in design, with any attempt at going into the booking process having zero response for me.

At this point I phoned around most of the companies to see if I could get any information that wasn’t available on their sites, and to find out if there was any flexibility in the remaining packages. Gullivers and Sportsworld weren’t interested in adding us to their tours if we weren’t going to take the package flight, even though I was happy for them to book an alternative for us (with a nice commission too no doubt).

By now we had decided that we really didn’t want to fly to Cape Town in between the two tests while we were there, ruling out England RT. That and the fact we’d automatically join the England Rubgy Travel club, and that’s too much to bear for a Scotsman, even for a Lions Trip

Thomas Cook already used Virgin and were happy to try and come to some arrangement and fit us into one of their remaining packages.

I’d had a look around for other agencies selling tours, but was pretty wary of going all the way to South Africa and ending up not getting a bloody ticket to the game!  While I was waiting to hear back from TC I found Living With The Lions who had an almost perfect option for our trip. I rang them up and they were happy to accommodate our requirements and confirmed official match tickets were included.

So why did we end up going with LWTL and not TC? Well we wanted to go to South Africa as part of an organised tour for mostly safety reasons ie. not getting shot.

Looking at LWTL’s website, they had pictures from the last Lions tour to New Zealand in 2005. It looked like what we thought a rugby tour should look like! The Thomas Cook Sport site, while full of information, didn’t convey that same tour feeling and we worried we’d end up stuck in our hotels for the whole trip waiting on our rep to come pick us up. Also going with a company that was originally created to go on a Lions tour gives us confidence it’ll be well organised and great fun. Being in a niche has its advantages!

A ticket to Think Visibility of course. 

Think Visibility is a one-day conference with a focus on the areas of web development and marketing which are usually left behind in the creation process: SEO, PPC, Monetisation, Blogging, Accessibility and Usability. 

All 100 tickets were snapped up quickly over Christmas, leaving you the option of sponsoring the event as the only way to get tickets.

Fear not! I have a spare ticket!

Convince me that you are the rightful person to get the ticket and it’s yours! How, What, Where etc.. you do that I’ll leave up to you, but make it entertaining!

Still not convinced you really really need to go? Have a look at the list of speakers! That’s all A-list!

Small Print -

Closing Date: 30th January

Competition Rules: You are taking this too seriously!

Update:  Sponsorship slots are now all available at £500, which includes two tickets to attend! This also means I now have two tickets to give away.