Work

Southwest Alabama Tourism

March 28, 2008 by joewatts

Went to Thomasville, Alabama on Wednesday (we took a different route than my normal path down Highway 5 through Brent and Marion by going down I-65 through Maplesville and on through Selma and Orville, Alabama). Beautiful drive, but haven’t gone that way in years.

Met with the Ala-Tom RC&D folks to discuss the website for Southwest Alabama Regional Tourism (alabamasfrontporches.com). We had a great productive meeting and I’ve downloaded all the files and started working on revamping the site. First, I corrected a few glaring problems–like setting appropriate fonts and resizing photos. I’m looking forward to getting into the real meat of the subject in the coming weeks as the folks down south send me information to fill in the site. We’re starting with 5 attractions in each county (11 total counties) and we’ll work our way through that in the next two months. Once we’ve completed that, we’re going to create some Black Belt Driving Tours and some other information about festivals in Southwest Alabama. Should be fun.

The whole point is to get folks who are traveling through to stop and also to encourage travelers to come and visit Alabama’s Front Porches and learn about Southwest Alabama.

Your Town Alabama Blog Again

March 25, 2008 by joewatts

If it has been a few weeks since you looked at the Your Town Alabama blog, you should really take a peek again. I’ve added several dozen entries in the last three weeks (almost one entry every day). Good stuff, I think. I’ve noticed a significant increase in the number of hits the website is getting on a daily basis as a result of the blog, so overall I’m very pleased.

And in other news, I’m off tomorrow to visit the folks in Thomasville to discuss Alabama’s Front Porches. This isn’t my site design (actually, it is the old State Tourism Department’s website design that was borrowed for use in the Black Belt). The site design works okay, but needs some work. There are some coding issues that need to be addressed. Keywords need to be modified to tighten the tourism focus to the Black Belt and the counties that this project concentrates on.

The content is in need of some work as well. That’s where I come in. I’m working with the University of Alabama and Ala-Tom RC&D to provide some additional content–and content direction. We’ll be meeting tomorrow to get some organizational discussions moving forward. This is a pretty big project, and really important, too. Having grown up so near there with sisters who still live there makes me want to do all I can to make it a better place–and to show other people what a wonderful place it already is!

Another Sierra Club Newsletter

March 11, 2008 by joewatts

The more newsletters I do, the more I enjoy doing them. I’ve gotten really fast at putting together the Alabama Sierran, though a large part of that comes from constantly looking over information that can go into it and having an idea of what I want to put into it before it comes due. I get more and more submissions for this monthly newsletter (now in year three of production). When we started putting this newsletter together, there were a few pieces devoted to local issues, but much of the information was pulled from national sources–or in the very least from other state sources.

Now, the Sierra Club members seem to have really bought into the concept of the state newsletter and submit everything from articles about some controversial project to photos from their outings.

Alabama’s Front Porches

March 8, 2008 by joewatts

I’m just getting started working on a new site. I didn’t develop the look of the site, but they need help with updating it, examining the design and structure and determining what sort of direction they need to go in to improve the site for visitors. I’m particularly excited about this project because it is a part of the Black Belt in Alabama.

I’ve worked with many of these people on different projects (from Your Town Alabama and Scenic Byways, to Alabama Communities of Excellence and the Alabama Association of RC&D’s). But, I haven’t had the chance to do much work in the Black Belt where I grew up. I’ve made a trip to Thomasville, AL so far, and have several more trips to Clarke County scheduled. Should be fun. In the meantime, check out their site (prior to my working on it) at www.alabamasfrontporches.com. It has some driving tours, a listing of some restaurants and some activities to do while in the Black Belt. We’ll be working on many more. Right now, it isn’t that well developed and it has some issues related to how things have been updated (photos placed in at the wrong size and people not familiar with html making changes to code), but we’ll be working on that in the coming months as well as developing substantially more interesting and significant tours and descriptions of the many wonderful places in the Black Belt of Southwestern Alabama.

I just picked up an interesting new book on community tourism: Destination Branding for Small Cities: The Essentials for Successful Place Branding by Bill Baker. (if you buy it through this link, I’ll get a bit of money from Amazon.com) I’m looking forward to reading it in more depth and getting some fresh ideas. I’m hoping that this book and a few others I’ve ordered will help me better work with the Alabama’s Front Porches folks and do an even better job of coaching them into a stronger identity.