USATP Blog //

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

A busy spring

With the calendar turning to May, we believed it a great time to give a quick update on what is going on at USA Tour Pros.

As a new Web site, we have been very pleased with the numbers of new Members signing up for the site, as well as the traffic from daily visitors stopping by to check things out. Just yesterday (April 29) we set a new record of 63 individual visitors on the Web site at one time. We have had a steady growth of Registered members signing up for a free account throughout our three months “live”—even our lofty expectations are being surpassed. And, we’ve also been able to connect Tour Professionals with Tour Operators for work this spring already.

The daily push to include as much valuable information for all of our Members and Registered visitors is the direct result of the tireless work of Senior Contributing Editor, Mariann Millard. While juggling her own hectic professional and private schedules she has found the time to continually add interesting articles and updates to our Forums section. It’s been a real challenge developing the site as I have been on-and-off the road, but exciting developments are just ahead.

After a bit of a delay, we are pushing forward with the development of USA Tour Pros University, where we hope to be offering classes through our site starting in May. Tour Pros U will consist of up to 300 classes, many of which relate to a Tour Professional’s career or skill-set development. We’re excited to start offering online learning opportunities for our Members and believe we will see a large influx of interested visitors to the site once the classes are running.

In the past, on our old Web site, I found there was a predictable push for immediate access to location/vendor information throughout the busy spring tour season, followed by a more conversational Forums board in the slower months. We are looking to develop our Forums section to make it as vibrant as the old board, while realizing this isn’t really the best time of year to do it. I encourage all Members to post insights, questions, facts, and so forth on the Forums section to continue the Professional dialogue that is pertinent to the growth of the Web site.

I received a call from Tim Scanlon asking if it was possible to offer a “daily digest”-type recap of the latest postings to the site to help all of us in too much of a hurry to scan through the posting to find all the latest ones. Our Webmaster, Tommy Nguyen, suggested I offer information on RSS feeds for all. A quick excerpt from the previous link states: “[The RSS feed] allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually.” In some browsers you will see the “RSS” in the address bar at the top of the page, which you can easily click on for the latest postings (click to see a screenshot). I use the Safari Web browser on my Mac laptop, and when I go to our Forums the “RSS” option appears in the address bar. I can click on it and see all of the latest postings immediately. We have RSS feeds enabled for the Blog, Podcasts, Members, and Jobs sections, so it’s easy to stay up-to-date (some of these feeds require a full site Membership).

This great, time-saving feature is available for Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari, and Opera Web browsers. Give it a try!

Finally, we plan to offer another Membership giveaway this year and we’re working diligently to make that a reality. We also would like to offer our Members the opportunity to earn referral credit for future Membership dues by getting others to join USA Tour Pros. As always, we are open to listening to any Member’s ideas of how we can improve the Web site. We feel as an organization we have started off strongly, but most of the best ideas incorporated already here on USA Tour Pros were ideas given to us by other Tour Professionals.

Keep the dialogue and ideas flowing!