According to Australia’s Guide: “ATDW is the perfect solution and an invaluable asset for us!”
Australias.guide (https://www.australias.guide/) is deeply integrated with ATDW and one of the few sites that utilize virtually all of the ATDW content including accommodation, attractions, events, tours, food & drink, hire, transport and destination information.
According to David Shirley, Australias.guide (AG) was not always what you see today. “In fact AG is our most recent release which launched in July 2017. So in effect we are a very young site. But our history goes back a long way… We were previously ‘About Australia’ (www.about-australia.com) and had been in operation continuously since 1996. Yep… right back when the internet was just a pup.”
According to Shirley, it was a personal project for him as he had a keen interest in this new ‘web’ thing and wanted to get involved. He decided the best way to understand it was to learn how to build a website.
“I decided it would be useful to have a site where you could find out stuff about Australia… So, I hand-coded around 300 pages in HTML and About-Australia.com was born. The site grew as the web became more popular and by the time Y2K came along we realized that we needed to take advantage of the emerging technologies to help us manage and maintain our content, said Shirley.
“As you can imagine, finding content for a national site is an enormous task and we desperately needed more content. We first heard about ATDW in the early 2000’s and we quickly came to the conclusion that it was the perfect solution for us. The ATDW was new then too, so we have worked together from almost the beginning. I was a senior partner at Guerrilla Digital (a web development company) at that time and recall we even collaborated with ATDW to develop some solutions to support integration of the data. Since then Guerrilla have assisted many clients to integrate ATDW into their sites.”
“ATDW was a game-changer for us. Once launched, our site grew in size from a few hundred pages to thousands of pages and in turn our traffic grew by a similar factor.” According to Shirley, it vastly relieved the pressure to manage and maintain the content because they could be confident that the data was properly curated and up to date (effortlessly refreshing the listings they published on each page).
“The all new www.australias.guide now consumes more ATDW data than ever before and we have integrated additional data sources to compliment it, such as Local Government Areas and ABS data to the point where we can now deliver some meaningful information for every town, area and most major suburbs in the country. ATDW helps us deliver supporting product (places to stay, things to see & do, places to eat etc) for all these locations and some destination information for a significant percentage of them. Although,the level of integration we have achieved with australias.guide is not a typical one nor was it a simple integration, but it has had a profound effect on how we structure our content,” added Shirley.
Shirley concluded: “We believe that ATDW integration is an invaluable asset for sites that promote Tourism products for any area, particularly organizations like RTO’s Local Tourism Organisations and Councils.. So much so, that we are now working on building an exciting solution to deliver turn-key ATDW-ready portals that will be cost effective and easy to use. Fully featured websites built with ATDW displayed content in mind, which we intend to have available in Q1 of 2019… so watch this space! ”
