VisitFlorida.com Redux. Continuing the Conversation With Florida's Interactive Team.

Hello Sunshine! This is the second installation of a two part conversation with CA Clark, VP of Electronic Publishing at Miles Media, the interactive agency for VisitFlorida. Yesterday, CA responded to our initial questions about the inspiration for the design of the new VisitFlorida site and it's novel use of tag clouds as a primary navigational element (yesterday's blog is available here). Today, we're going to primarily focus on content - who manages it, how portable is it and how Florida handles the vast sea of user generated content, comments and photos.

How are your partners able to edit/add content to the site? Is the process automated or do they have to be facilitated via staff?

In a variety of ways, but the main way is via a partner extranet application that we also re-built from scratch as part of the new site. That application embraces a lot of the same technological approaches in terms of focusing on the user interface and employing AJAX and JavaScript to do as much as we can without having to reload the page.

Through the data engine, partners can add, edit and delete their property information, amenities, photos, videos, 360s, events deals and respond to comments made about their property.

I've been working exclusively in the web publishing business for 12 years and I can definitively say that this is the most complex, most complete and largest project I've ever been involved in. We had an active team of about 12 people working on various aspects of this project for over 14 months. It's been a long road, and we're really happy with the result, we hope Florida visitors will be too.

What considerations were made so that your data is portable (i.e. can be used to generate widget/gadgets on social sites)?

The whole architecture of the site is really built to be modular. Essentially all the data we've got - photos, videos, stories, trips, etc are all stored in their own silos. So if we wanted to say take the photo strip piece and turn that into a widget for use on another site, it's really just a matter of dumping the structure we already have into XML and distributing the widget. It's something we'll be looking at after launch.

The Florida site is awash with opportunities for users to contrinute their opinions and photos to the site. With so much UGC and commenting available, how are you handling the monitoring and editing of those comments? How are you handling negative comments?

We're trying to make the site both as useful and as transparent as possible. To that end, user comments are posted immediately. There are several steps to get to that point, including a illegal words filter and verification to make sure you're a human; but we felt that if users had to wait for a day to see their comments, we'd kill the whole concept of sharing. Visual content like photos and videos are a different story, before those are publicly available they need to be reviewed by a human since there's no AI I'm aware of that could accurately filter out inappropriate content. As for negative comments, they'll stay as long as they're relevant to tourism and verifiable.

Why were certain elements...text, font, color, size...selected for the site?

Obviously there are a lot of different factors that go into design, not the least of which is the branding campaign and approach of the client.

In this case, VISIT FLORIDA's "sunshine" campaign was the basis for the design and implemented in a way that we hoped wouldn't get in the way of the use of the site. Beyond that, we tried to use web-safe fonts wherever we could and minimize the number of images that had to be created and to be consistent throughout with the visual cues we provided. Most of the active stuff has the same little blue buttons, the links are all consistently formatted, titles are similarly formatted, etc.

Tell us what you think! Does the new Florida site inspire you to hit the beach? Take our online poll and give us your feedback!

Case Study: A Conversation With the VisitFlorida.com Interactive Team

I've always been impressed with the interactive programs at Visit Florida and have developed a tremendous amount of respect for CA Clark (Vice President of Electronic Publishing) and the rest of the team at MilesMedia who work on the account. In fact, the Florida site was one of the top five inspirations for me when I started working on our programs in Oregon three years ago.

When Troy and I found out that VisitFlorida.com relaunched their site this winter, we just couldn't help but chat up CA Clark for his insight into the new site. The following is part one of a two part e-mail conversation between CA and the Interactive Trend Report.

How was the design of the site used to create a positive impression of Florida?

First of all, this is really a very different approach to design than I think you would typically see on a destination site. Instead of the big header visuals, we've got a very large content area that incorporates tons of thumbnails, maps and tools. So from the start, we're not approaching this as a traditional design project. Instead we tried to look at it more like an application, which is the direction we think the web is really going. To answer your question more directly - I think we're creating a positive impression of Florida through the presentation of the content on the site - photos, videos, stories, trips, listings - rather than through the site itself. We're trying to get out of our own way and let the content speak for itself.

What websites, either travel-related or not, influenced the new site?

Lots really, the home page and tag display pages owe some to Yahoo!'s niche sites like food.yahoo.com; the trip planner borrows some from backpackit.com and basecamphq.com; Kayak and Pricegrabber were both models for some of the listing display stuff that we did. There are lots more, I'm sure I'm missing some important ones. We were definitely trying to make something that was competitive not just on a destination basis, but on a broader web industry basis.

How are you, or will you, integrate the print travel guide into the site and vice versa?

The VISITFLORIDA.com site is meant to be the primary fulfillment mechanism, so there purposely aren't a lot of references from the site back out to the guide. Having said that, the new site creates a lot of new possibilities for intertwining content between the two such as integrating the experts into the guide with references out to the site or including user-supplied photos or trips in the print products.

What do you think the reaction will be to the tag cloud navigation structure?

We did quite a bit of usability during the build, and a lot of that was focused on the navigation. What was interesting is that while the test users didn't necessarily understand what a tag was, it didn't prevent them from using the site as intended. So we changed some of our labels, but basically we found that people didn't have to understand the structure for it to be useful. So far our beta testers don't seem to have had problems either, so we're feeling pretty positive about the public reaction when we do the full release.

Tune in tomorrow for a continuation of this conversation. In the meantime, do tell us what you think about the new Florida site via our online poll (click the link to vote if reading via email or RSS). How do you feel about the use of "tag clouds" as a primary navigational element? Does the creative inspire you to hit the beach?

Word of the Week - Folksonomy

A means of classifying and categorizing data on the web through collaborative efforts from the online community. Commonly known as (though not strictly synonymous to) ‘tagging’.

The basic idea behind a Folksonomy is rather than save files in a typical folder structure, you simply apply a tag to that file ('Budget' for instance). And then, when you need to find the file, you search for 'budget'. No need to click-thru that giant list of folders. Or, at least that is the basic idea.

Unfortunately, folksonomies won't improve your organizational skills.