I’ve been listening to audio books lately instead of reading since I run for about an hour a day. Most people think I’m crazy to listen to business books while I run, but it’s a great way to keep your mind busy while exercising. I listened to this one while training for the New York Marathon and liked it so much I heard it start to finish 3 times.
This was an awesome book that breaks branding down to seven “steps” or parts. The author refers to these as pieces of the Primal Code. Here they are the first two.

1. The Creation Story: You must tell the story of how your brand or product was created.

Examples: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in their garage, Mark Zuckerburg started Facebook while at Harvard and dropped out, Nike was founded by Phil Knight who sold shoes out of his car and by Bill Bowerman who was Steve Prefontaine’s coach.

2. The Creed: You need a mission statement or words to live by.

Exampes: Apple’s “Buidling computers for the rest of us,” or ECHO’s “Bring together families and friends for legendary adventures.”

This isn’t a tagline or normal mission statement, but rather something that employees would climb to the top of a mountain and shout in pride.

The book is downright awesome and I’ll let you read the rest to learn more about the Primal Code.

This is a great way for amateur photographers to easily publish their photos to the web in a professional manner.

We did this entire redesign through email. I would upload a version of the site that I liked and they would email me with feedback about their site. I would make the changes and they would comment on the changes. It was an iterative process that we did together that produced sensational results. By working together this way we were able to work on this on our free time over a course of about three weeks.

This method of collaboration is extremely efficient and only possible by using Dreamweaver templates and CSS - cascading style sheets.

The most noticeable things are the lack of pictures and the simplified navigation. I felt that the pictures were taking away from the content of the site. As for the navigation, I wanted it to be simpler and felt like I could combine a few pages. In all, I believe that this site communicates what we do much better than the old one.

The general idea (as I see it) is that the average person visits several different websites (their favorites) when they “surf” the web to catch up with anything new and exciting. An RSS feed is a compact version of this latest new and exciting stuff that can be used by a computer program to bring all of the new and exciting new from all of your favorite websites together.

How do I use an RSS feed?

Most websites that have feeds, advertise them with chicklets. The most common chicklet is orange and says “RSS” or “XML.” When you click on a chicklet, it takes you to the feed. Once you have the URL of the feed, you can cut and paste into a newsreader, home page, or “live” bookamark. What?
1. Newsreaders: These are computer programs that you download to your computer and install to read newsfeeds. Once installed, you tell it the location of the newsfeed on the internet and the program checks for any updates. So if you have ten newsfeeds (from your favorite websites) then you’ll be getting all the new and exciting news from your favorite websites all in once place as soon as it happens.
2. Home Pages: Many people use My Yahoo! or Google Personalized home page to check the daily weather, stocks, or see Garfield each day. The homepage on my browser is set to my Yahoo page and I check my horoscope and stocks at least five times a day. I can also add RSS feeds to this home page. So now my page has weather, stocks, cartoons, and the latest news from the ECHO blog as well as this one. Google has a very similar service as well as others.
3. “Live Bookmarks”: This is one of the hottest things out there and is a big part of the new Firefox. You can add an RSS feed to your bookmarks and quickly check the latest and greatest from your favorite website.

Now I’m offering advertising at $200 per river page per year. Each page will have a maximum of 3 “featured outfitters” unless the first advertiser pays $400 per year to claim that page. I’ll spend 25% of the money I take in for each page for “smart” Google Adwords advertising that is directed to the river page you advertise on.

Blogs are the hot new thing for many reasons that I won’t discuss here. The front page of CaliRiver.com syndicates news from various blog sources. This is a great way to publicize your blog. Adding your blog to this page costs $100 per year. Again, I’ll spend $25 of this money to advertise the home page with Google AdWords.

Here are the direct benefits from advertising on CaliRiver.com.

• Quality links for your website that will help with your search engine rankings. I include a link to your home page and internal page with the anchor text that you want. The pages are optimized to give you the best quality link.
• Traffic for your web site. The ads are front and center and designed to send traffic to your web site.
• Your phone number. Most online advertising won’t publish a phone number because they want the user to follow the link to your site. This is so they can track the links and report on how useful the advertising is. My goal in this advertising is to make it as easy as possible for the customer to contact you. I’m going to leave it to you to track the usefulness of the advertising.
]]> http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/web-design/advertising-on-calirivercom/feed/ http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/web-design/updated-echo-web-site http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/web-design/updated-echo-web-site#comments Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:36:08 +0000 zach web design http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/web-design/updated-echo-web-site I’ve been working on updating the ECHO web site (www.echotrips.com) over the past few weeks to give it a better look and to make the site infrastructure better. Here are the highlights of a website makeover.
• The images up top are now full pictures instead of colored boxes with a small picture in them. This took hundreds of high quality digital pictures to find the right ones. Awesome pictures are the key to a great website.
• I did a blog make-over by moving the blog from a subdirectory (www.echotrips.com/blog) to a subdomain (blog.echotrips.com). I’m not really sure what this will do, but it makes a few things easier on my end and it allows us to separate the statistics for the blog and the rest of the site. There are a few theories about how this migh affect search engine rankings.
1. Using a subdomain will decrease the depth of the folders and the Google likes pages that are contained in higher folders. I’m not sure if I agree with this one.
2. Google treats subdomains (i.e. blog.echotrips.com) as different entities than the main domain (i.e. www.echotrips.com) and the content in the blog subdomain won’t help the main domain in the search engines. I’m not sure if I agree with this one either.
• I also changed the blog software from Blogger to Wordpress. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while because Wordpress allows more control over the site and has a beter site feed. Blogger has been down alot which has been quite annoying.
• I gave the whole site a cleaner look, made the code simpler, and cleaned up the CSS. Now the pages load faster and more of the pages on the site are validated html code.
• Finally, I switched our hosting service to Dreamhost. I’ve been using Dreamhost with some of my other sites and have found the company very fun and friendly. I really like the control panel which is not only very intuitive, but also just plain fun to use. Dreamhost is a company that is built on the principals that I believe so I had to switch. The downsides are that they seem to have more downtime and we’re getting more spam.
• Our site statistics are now done with the free Google Analytics instead of a paid service. Google analytics is much better and integrates easily with our Adwords campaign.

This is a huge undertaking, but it’s nice to have everything updated to a modern set of tools. Please comment on any of these makeover ideas.

]]> http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/web-design/updated-echo-web-site/feed/ http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/good-business/lets-look-at-rafting-reservation-systems http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/good-business/lets-look-at-rafting-reservation-systems#comments Fri, 06 Oct 2006 18:44:56 +0000 zach good business http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/good-business/lets-look-at-rafting-reservation-systems The season is over and it’s time to start planning for 2007. One of the hot topics out there is reservation systems because the long time solutions are built on databases like Microsoft Access and Foxpro that don’t interact well with the internet, are slow, and difficult to find (inexpensive) programmers for. There are more modern solutions that can interact with the internet, are more customizable, and take online reservations.

Needs for a modern reservation system:

• Online reservations: This includes the ability to take money from customers online, take trip information from customers online, and/or make initial contact with a customer online. Most people are afraid to make initial contact with a customer online, but wouldn’t it be nice if they filled out an online form that automatically entered their personal information into your database instead of having them fax a form in and having office staff do that.
• Multiple locations: Access your reservations, trip information, and customer information from any of your river operations or satellite offices.
• Easy to use: It shouldn’t be all that hard to take a reservation and add a customer. Someone should be able to create a reservation system that is intuitive enough that it doesn’t need a user’s manual.

What’s out there:

• Resmark Sytems: This is a system developed by a team of programmers in conjunction with Western River Expeditions. They seem to have thought of everything and offer a full service product. The online reservation part is well thought out and should be available this fall. Pros: This is a solid company and a full service product. Cons: Expensive and possibly too much product for smaller outfitters.
• Arctic Reservations: This is a product that I’ve worked on in conjuction with a programmer that I met a few years ago. We’ve tailored it to ECHO’s needs and we really like it. The entire system is run through the internet with MySQL and PHP which makes it easy to update and can be used anywhere. It’s also designed so that email communication with customers is easy. Pros: Accessible from anywhere, inexpensive, and easy to use. Cons: Designed and maintained by a small staff and built for multiday trips.
• Adventure Central: I haven’t seen this product or really even know much about it, but I’ve heard it’s very well designed and thought out. It seems to be designed for all adventure companies, but still customizable for rafting companies. I’m assuming they are already all over online reservations. In addition, they have a great system for distributing trip inventory through online travel sites. Pros: Highly established company, accessible from anywhere, and well connected to the web. Cons: May not be optimal for rafting and expensive.

Hopefully this information helps understand what’s out there. Please comment on any changes or improvements to the above if you have more information.

]]> http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/good-business/lets-look-at-rafting-reservation-systems/feed/ http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/blogging/marketing-web-20-style http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/blogging/marketing-web-20-style#comments Sat, 30 Sep 2006 02:33:27 +0000 zach blogging good business http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/blogging/marketing-web-20-style Now I’m back in the swing of things and spend my day behind my computer trying to spread the ECHO word. To this end, I’m learning all about web 2.0 which is a term that describes websites that are either truly interactive or include some sort of application. My biggest lesson is that it’s 2006 so if your website was designed in 1997 or even 2003 for that matter, you could be a generation or two behind.

So web 2.0 is all about blogs and aggregating, clean design, and user tagging (voting on good content). If you don’t know what a blog is, don’t bother reading on. Either you or someone high up the food chain in your rafting company (small business) needs to immerse themself in the blog thing. This person should be in their twenties, or even teens, and should be addicted to MySpace.

Some of the coolest stuff I’ve played with:

• Digg.com: This site get news from everywhere and syndicates it for it’s readers. Users submit and vote on the stories (blog posts usually). There are several sites that do this, but this one has the best design and seems to be the most popular.
• YouTube.com: This could replace TV. I wish I had some great videos of our trips or something to add to YouTube. In todays world there are TV shows and “Internet Shows.” I’m living at the office these days with no TV. When I need some entertainment, I pay $1.99 to watch The Office through iTunes or I surf YouTube.
• Technorati.com: This site is the leading search engine for blogs. I’m not too impressed by the blog search, but people are using this site by the bjillions.
• MySpace.com: This is a social networking site that todays youth spends all their time on. I just created a myspace page for ECHO at www.myspace.com/echotrips. I’m dying to see what kind of traffic from this. I love getting new friends.

In general, it seems that traffic (or at least good traffic) from search engines will start to decline and that traffic (good traffic) from the sites above or sites like them will start to take over, web 2.0 style. I feel sorry for rafting companies and small businesses in general that had their web site designed by an out of touch web designer (pre-web 2.0) in 2003 to the standards of 1997.

It’s time to start embracing web standards and stop making websites with picture of words and start using words. You can make awesome web sites with some CSS and by coding with html instead of Photoshop and slices.

]]> http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/blogging/marketing-web-20-style/feed/ http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/the-pub/the-end-of-the-2006-rafting-season http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/the-pub/the-end-of-the-2006-rafting-season#comments Thu, 14 Sep 2006 03:30:18 +0000 zach the pub http://www.tallacdesigns.com/blog/the-pub/the-end-of-the-2006-rafting-season Well, we made it through the 2006 season and did pretty well. ECHO ran 71 more guests down the Rogue and 102 more down the Middle Fork of the Salmon. The Tuolumne was down 63 guests and I’m guessing that it is due to the high water cancellations.

Now I’m back in the real world and thought I’d recap some lessons from this season.

• Managing a river company in the summer is hard, hard work.
• It isn’t realistically possible to guide/manage and watch the marketing of a rafting company at the same time.
• There are a lot of ways to save money if you and your guides care about the company and put the extra time in.

From talking with guest this summer and looking at our web statistics, here are some generalizations about where we’re headed for 2007.

• Slow down on Google Adsense. Most people research many companies and as long as you’re in the top five of the search engines, they’ll find you.
• By far, our best online advertising came from www.c-w-r.com. This site brought us 10 times as many leads as any other that we advertise with.
• People love the blog and they don’t even know what it is. I heard several guests say that they really enjoy reading the updated news and stories. We’ll be going full bore with the blog this season.
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