Travel Blog Promotion Blog

Three cheers for my interns this week, as we have just launched 2 websites from scratch in a week. As part of our ever growing travel site empire, we have launched this Barcelona restaurants site and this Barcelona events site.

Day1 - Wednesday

So last wednesday afternoon, we had a brainstorming session for domain names, and came up with feedmebarcelona.com for the restaurant site, as it is catchy and memorable. A rather less imaginative, but all the same descriptive name for whatsonbarcelona.com. We chose not to focus too much on keywords in domain, and instead think of something a little brandable that people would remember to type in. Registered the domains and went home. Decided to set up the restaurant site first, then the event listing site.

Day 2 - Thursday

We new roughly what sort of sites we wanted, however we needed to plan structure and what tools and systems we would use to make them. The sites needed to be:

• easy to navigate
• simple to maintain
• quick and easy to add content to
• Modifiable in the future
• Quick to set up
• look professional and have linkworthy content
• Have good internal linking for seo
• Be magnet for user generated content

Feedmebarcelona restaurant site

For the restaurant site, we used Joomla with K2 component so we could easily add extra fields such as price/telephone number/opening hours, google map, and have better control over thumbnails than the standard joomla content system. K2 also has integrated social media buttons, and a tag system in addition to a category system, so we could group the restaurants better. We added jomcomments to the site so users can add their own review.

I set up the server and installed and configured Joomla and plugins, and went off looking for a nice template, whilst two of the interns got a pen and paper and worked out the categories and tags we were going to use. I showed them how to add the categories, and we worked out what sizes the images were to be.

As I tweaked the template, knocked up a quick logo in photoshop and sorted out the module positions and the different views, the interns got on with populating the categories, creating the menu links and adding some sample restaurants. Finished the day with the basic site up, but still lots to do! Went and had a beer or 10 to celebrate.

Day 3 - Friday the 13th!

Got into worked and reviewed the previous day´s efforts. Not bad, but rough around the edges. We discussed some minor changes in the formatting of some of the pages, and the girls cracked on with adding some restaurants. Worked on the about us, and how to add a review pages, and tweaked module positions and minor styling issues. Installed analytics, tweeted and social bookmarked a page on a few services so google would come and have a look (site got about 4 pages indexed within a few hours of this). By the end of the day, we had a very respectable looking website, which had a decent amount of restaurants on it. Had beers to celebrate. Launching a site on friday 13th, lucky for some.

Day 4 - Saturday

Had beers to celebrate.

Day 5 - Sunday

Had beers to celebrate.

Day 6 - Monday

Oh no! One intern calls in sick. Suspect it is a hangover, but don´t like to say in case its not, so down to only 1 assistant! We reviewed previous weeks work. At eleven in the morning, the electricity to the whole building was cut off, so went for a coffee whilst we waited. Was back on 15 mins later, so back to work. Google had been and indexed around 20 pages over the weekend. Spotted glaring mistakes here and there such as images not formatted correctly, and the odd broken link, which we fixed. Remaining intern got busy writing descriptions to add for each category and tag, whilst I got on with setting up the events website.

whatsonbarcelona.com

We went with joomla and eventlist for this site. Eventlist is not quite as cleanly put together as K2, but is much better for organizing the content by category/date range/venue. Standard eventlist styling was very messy, and I wanted a clean site, so would have to bugger around in the template files making it look clean. Also, duplicate content and dodgy urls started driving me slightly crazy, but managed to find an acceptable solution, even if the urls are not the prettiest. Got one of the interns to put a couple of events and a venue or two on to try out the different views. By the end of the day had more or less the system set up correctly, and after fiddling around with different image sizes and what not, had the format and structure of the site clear.

Day 7 - Tuesday

Intern still sick. Must be hellava hangover, or she really isn´t well. The morning saw frantic adding of events and venues by the good old interns, whilst I concentrated on styling the internal pages, and knocked up a quick logo in photoshop. Was starting to feel happy about how the site looked and functioned. Added a text search box on feedmebarcelona.com

Day 8 - today

Ok, I said 2 sites in 7 days, but I´m sticking an extra day on because I don´t work at the weekend, and we were a man down for 2 days.

So today, we went over all the events for the event site and checked internal links, that images were correct, that there were descriptions for all categories etc. Spent the rest of the day doing minor bug and styling fixes, created the images for the category pages, did a social bookmark blast to the site to get it indexed. Installed analytics for events site. Looked over restaurant site, built some links to internal pages. Interns put on a few more restaurants, and added some events and venues. Then I wrote this post.

Whats next?

After succesfully completing this challenge, there is now a new one. To have 500 unique visitors registered for each site by the end of august, thats 13 days. Bring it on! We will also aim to regularly add new restaurants, and encourage users to leave reviews on feedmebarcelona, and add some more interesting events for barcelona that are not always to be found on other websites.