The site development has been through the following phases and encompasses several smaller wordpress-based sites which will go live shortly with their own Wild Wings Safaris wordpress theme.

• Search engine marketing and strategy consulting
• Wireframing and Information Architecture
• Logo redesign
• User Interface Design
• Expression Engine Development
• Custom PHP/MySQL development
• Front End Development and Browser Testing

At the back end there is also a rates management application (running on ExpressionEngine stand alone entry forms) where Wild Wings Safaris administrative staff can manage pricing for tours and accommodations. This is complimented on the front end by an ajax currency converter which stores the user’s currency preferences in a cookie for future visits.

My ExpressionEngine weblog setup is based around a location hierarchy with accompanying geodata which all my other content such as accommodations, tours, client feedback and more is related to. This gives us a solid geodata driven base from which we can grow the site and hopefully theWild Wings Safari online business.

Here’s the finished product: Wild Wings Safaris

I hadn’t worked with the CMS before but have really been wanting to get to grips with it for quite a while now. I think I’ve learned a lot and I have another EE site of considerable complexity in the works at the moment. It’s a great platform that is going to really blow up when EE 2 comes around and merges with the CodeIgniter PHP framework.

I will post a full breakdown of how I approached the job soon, from strategy to art direction to development and promotion, but for the mean time I just wanted to announce that it is finally up. It’s featured on quite a few CSS galleries and everyone I’ve spoken to (especially my client) has quite liked the design. Definitely a break from the norm in terms of your average travel site.

To co-incide with the launch and drum up some buzz around this new brand, we’re running a little competition with a choice between two travel prizes, each valued at R15,000. The winner gets to choose between an overland trip or a luxury safari destination.

The competition is pretty simple.

• You need to write either a blog post, flickr photo description or publish a youtube video that says something about travelling Africa.
• The copy must be a minimum of 100 words and be all your own work – no plagiarism or copyright violations please.
• You need to link to www.discoverafrica.com somewhere on the page.
• The post we like the best and that gets the most genuine comments and positive response wins the prize.
• When you’re done crafting your entry, head over to www.discoverafrica.com/win/ and let us know where to find it.
• At 12h00 on Tues 21 April 2009 entries will close. Obviously the sooner you get something published, the longer you have to get the comments thread pumping.

For further info check out Discover Africa and particularly the competition entry page. Good luck!

Travel industry neologisms like this drive me batty. Whether or not you find the word itself an annoying addition to the travel industry’s vocabulary, the item itself is generally pretty cool. Its basically any trip that entails working in local communities whilst you travel. Voluntours are growing in popularity with socially conscious gap-year students, particularly of the European variety.

I guess what I like about the voluntourism concept is that its a two-way cultural exchange, as opposed to your typical voyeuristic tourist experience. A voluntour can take place in the context of teaching self-reliance or linguistic skills to remote villages, or as a contribution to disaster management where necessary – there’s a diverse array of scenarios.

Where I’ve become aware of voluntours is when I’ve seen them crop up as packages on the travel sites I’ve dealt with. Being a stickler for calling a spade a spade, I’ve been tending towards rewriting this as a “volunteer tour” or “volunteer tourism”. I guess that we’ll have to wait and see whether the contracted form of the word gains any traction with the tourists themselves before voluntour can be despatched to the trash heap of rejected neologisms.

You can read more about Offbeat Guides on Sifry’s blog.