WalesCymru.com

Today a colleague emailed details of a new listing on the Welsh Assembly’s Sell2Wales website. It appears the Assembly is inviting suitably qualified companies to quote for “Writing the WEFO (funding) application for the Digital Tourism Business Project“.

So what is this all about and more importantly what can a £24m ‘Digital Tourism’ project do for Welsh Tourism?

According to the Project’s RFQ the “Digital Tourism Business Project aims to transform both the data infrastructure and strategic landscape of Wales.”

The intention is to “deliver an environment whereby the tourism industry … can use a definitive and accessible information feed as part of a platform for marketing and the development of innovative business networks” and “prepare tourism in Wales for integration into a wider digital business network.”

In order to achieve this it is proposed that the project will:

• Provide innovative opportunities for tourism SME’s to fully embed ICT in business marketing and business processes including environmental best practice.
• Create virtual tourism business networks in order to create wider industry penetration and increase business generated in the online/digital marketplace.
• Establish an innovative digital tourism business framework to encourage additional digital/online business enquiries and ensure that efficient technological structures are in place so that enquiries generated can be easily and quickly converted by SME’s to improve bookabilities at all levels.
• Provide networking opportunities for tourism SME’s to capitalise on business opportunities stimulated by Visit Wales and encourage technological improvements & enhancement to key partner websites to further assist businesses
• Create a new e-CRM approach to working with tourism SME’s and establish support channels for SME’s
• Establish and implement a SME engagement Programme with ICT surgeries, focused tourism ICT advice and signposting to other providers

As a user of VisitWales data WalesCymru.com applauds this initiative. Access to high quality multilingual profiles, feature lists, accessibility details and availability - all updated by their owners in real time - can only help in the digital marketing Wales.

Let’s hope the project can deliver this promise, is inclusive in coverage, and embraces open systems and internationally recognized data formats.

The only concern is likely to be with the investment averaging £20,000 per operator. Some may question if this a good use of public money.

Everyone has a favourite pub - no seriously, even those who don’t like alcohol are still likely to have a favourite. It’s with this in mind we’re pleased to announce the addition of 52 new WalesCymru.com listings - all of them SA Brain’s Public Houses. Ok, this is not the full list of pubs in Wales, far from it. It’s also less than a quarter of the Welsh Brains Pubs, but it’s a start.

Why is this important?

I speculate that many customer focused businesses are now taking a serious look at Social Networks and the role community sites, such as WalesCymru.com, have in building brand and a deeper customer relationship. As these sites are expensive to develop and take time to build a user base, it makes sense to test the waters before embarking on their own social media offering. I’m not sure this is Brains’ thinking - maybe they’re just helping out a new Welsh start-up - but in making these listings available to WalesCymru.com users, some understanding of a public review site will be gained. This is where we need your help.

Review your favourite Brains’ Pub

In the spirit of pub researchers everywhere, I encourage all our users to check out these new listings and to post reviews for your favourite pub. If your local or personal favourite is not listed, please accept our apologies - it will be added shortly. In the meantime I’m sure, if you like pubs, you’ll find one here you’ve frequented - I know I’ve watched Wales’ games at several of these in recent memory.

• Aubrey Arms, Bonvilston
• Barocco, Cardiff
• Bay Hotel, Aberystwyth
• Black Lion, Lampeter
• Blackweir Tavern, Cardiff
• Churchills Hotel, Cardiff
• Cottage, Cardiff
• Darran, Risca
• Ferry Inn, St. Dogmaels
• Fox & Hounds, St. Mellons
• Fox & Hounds, Whitchurch
• Goat Major, Cardiff
• Grape & Olive, Cardiff
• Grape, Chepstow
• Grove Hotel, St. David’s
• Harbour Inn, Solva
• Hen & Chickens, Abergavenny
• Inncognito, Cardiff
• Lamb & Flag, Abergavenny
• Lord Beeching, Aberystwyth
• Lord Nelson, Milford Haven
• Monachty, Aberaeron
• Old Arcade, Cardiff
• Old Inn, Swanesa
• Old Post, Bonvilston
• Penhelig Arms, Aberdyfi
• Penwig, New Quay
• Pick & Shovel, Pontypridd
• Piercefield, St. Arvans
• Plas Derwen, Abergavenny
• Pump House, Swansea
• Punch House, Monmouth
• Reverend James, Swansea
• S.A. Brain & Company Limited
• Salt @ Aberystwyth
• Salt @ Cardiff Bay
• Salt @ the George, Swansea
• Savoy Country Inn, St. Clears
• Ship Inn, Tresaith
• Star, Dinas Powys
• Tafarn Tanerdy
• Terra Nova, Cardiff Bay
• Thomas Arms, Llanelli
• Three Arches, Cardiff
• Twelve Knights, Margam
• Ty Mawr, Lisvane
• Tynant, Morganstown
• Ty-Risha, Bridgend
• Watermill, Ogmore-By-Sea
• Wellington, Brecon
• Wharf, Cardiff
• Yard Bar & Kitchen, Cardiff

Learning a new language allows you to understand more about the world. In this respect the web community is just like any other; with it’s own culture, norms and language. If you know the language you have a much greater understanding how the community works and better access to the benefits that engagement provides for you and your company.

It was with this in mind I wonder how many people still don’t know what site visitors and page impressions actually mean.

Take today’s Western Mail which includes several large ads for their JobsWales site, promoting the fact (audited by ABC Electronic, so it must be right) that 123,000 people log onto their site and produce 1,989,229 page impressions each month.

Personally I think these very impressive figures are correct and reflect the way Wales’ 2m web users now access information; although they may also be misleading depending on how they are produced.

Let’s start with ‘people’ or ‘unique users’ as some sites call them - be careful these are different entities.

Did you know that many sites still count a visit from an automated ‘bot’ as a site visitor (person). Bots are used by Google, and around 60,000 other search engines, to produce their index of the web. Without then you would not appear in their search list, so they provide a very valuable service. As the web changes each second these bots have to revisit sites many times each month if they are keep up to date (as a site owner you can set the frequency of visit to be higher or lower). Why is this important? If you look closely at any servers’ web logs (the record of who actually visited and when), you see ‘bots’ make up between 50% and 90% of site visitors. As these bots trawl the site to index content, they can also make up a large percentage of the ‘page impressions’ (the number of times a ‘page’ is viewed).

Official Site Auditors (and here ABC Electronic are the most widely used) record Unique Users as someone with “a unique and valid identifier” and distinguish ‘actual people’ from ‘bots’ through the use of either: (i) IP+User-Agent, (ii) Cookie, and/or (iii) Registration ID.” (Cookies and Registration ID are the most accutrate as they are harder to automate, although not impossible -see Captcha Code for more details, if you’re interested).

I have no intention of discouraging companies from advertising online - I’d be a fool to do this as this is my business - and for the reasons stated above I am inclinced to believe the JobWales website gets 123,000 real people visiting each month and viewing on average 16.2 pages each. All I’m suggesting is that when you come to advertise online, that you measure results by the number of genuine and useful enquires you get and not by some reported readership, visitor number or impression stats that have limited commercial value.

Are you inspired by 2nd generation sites and want to work at the forefront of web development in Cardiff? Then we have the ideal job for you.

As an experienced rails developer you’ll be building clean, elegant and (re)usable code and web applications in Ruby on Rails, AJAX, PHP, Java, Javascript, CSS, HTML, XHTML, XML, and SQL.

To see what we expect, simply check out http://www.WalesCymru.com and let us know if you’re interested, and also how you’d develop this live (beta) site.

Hours: Full-Time. Holidays: Generous. Working Style: SCRUM. Rewards: Open ended.

This job is salaried and pays from £24,000 pa, although a senior developer can expect to earn more.

Share options are also a possibility as you’ll be producing some kick ass applications!

Email: rails@WalesCymru.com

WalesCymru.com celebrates three months since going live, and what an eventful three months they’ve been.

We have been very impressed with the reception we have received and with the quality of information that has been added. Yes, there has been the occasional piece of ’self-promotion’ or advertising copy masquerading as a review, but that’s par for the course on the modern internet and most of these have been removed within hours. What is far more impressive is the 1500 businesses that have been added or claimed, the 10,000+ unique visitors and the growing number of genuine *positive* reviews posted by actual customers, outnumbering negative reviews by 20:1.

From our side we’re working on some outstanding issues, stepping up our Search Engine Marketing, and scoping a range of new features that we believe will greatly improve the quality of our presentation and the ease with which listings can be found and accessed. In all over 40 improvements are planned for release in the next three months, so if you haven’t done so already now might be a good time to check and if necessary update your listing.

In the meantime, at this three month anniversary, we’d like to take this opportunity to say ‘Thank You’ to our users - it’s you, after all, who will make this site into the community resource that Wales needs and deserves.