At Sea with Cruise Holidays: From the Mouths of our Users!
As we near Thanksgiving, we at webtreepro have a lot to be thankful for–our colleagues, our families, and a truly wonderful cadre of clients. Last week, we had the opportunity to attend the annual convention of one of our franchise customers, Cruise Holidays. And not just any convention–this one was at sea! We joined the group in San Diego (home of our headquarters) and boarded the Radiance of the Seas for a five-night cruise to Ensenada and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. For the opportunity to be with a large group of our users and a great ship to sunny destinations is reason to be extra thankful. As a Minnesotan, escaping the cold for a week was a huge bonus!
At the meeting, we were able to spend significant time chatting directly with our client’s customers–what a great opportunity to really learn what they like about webtreepro, as well as what they struggle with. As business owners, they don’t have all day long to “play” with their websites, yet despite that time constraint, they’ve done some amazing work in short order. We saw some excellent landing pages and even some online “sign-up-to-cruise’ forms that were comprehensive and friendly to site visitors.
For our part, we got to “show-off” a bit and introduce them to all the neat little SEO features that they can easily engage to improve their local search rankings. In fact, we conducted five workshop sessions on that topic. In fact, we’re doing a follow-up online meeting next week so we can spend a bit more time teaching the details as well as catch up with those folks that couldn’t make the meeting.
We also taught a number of them how to embed video and even some pretty cool photo-walls using albums on Flickr, and a slick plug-in from CoolIris. It was truly wonderful to see the “wow, that was easy–I can’t believe I did that myself ” reaction. Getting a customer excited about taking a cruise is a lot easier with pictures and widgets that put them “on the ship.” One thing that was a big hit was the ability to put a weather widget on a landing page for a specific cruise, showing the current weather conditions. I can tell you on this gloomy, chilly day in Minnesota, if I was looking a cruise to St. Thomas and saw that is was a sunny 84 Fahrenheit, I might be motivated to action!
Of course, everyone’s interested in video and whether they’ve posted to YouTube or a commercial service like Screencast, we were able to show them how it takes about a minute to embed videos into their site.
The best part of all is getting a handle on what we can do to further enhance webtreepro. We have lots of our own ideas but hearing from day-to-day end users is invaluable. Plus, selfishly, it’s nice to be valued for what we do, and to get that recognition first-hand is really engergizing.
