In the coming weeks we’ll be opening up the site for registration – but why would you want to register for what is effectively a group of blogs? Will you see any benefits, what can or will you get out of it? These answers to your questions and more will be answered in the coming paragraphs.

What are we exactly doing that requires registration?

Simply put we’re implementing two new features. First, you’ll be able to register an update your own blog on the site. Much like on similar portals out there, but the difference here is that we’ll take your best travel stories and display them on the main page via rss feed. For those interested in city blogger however will still need to apply through traditional channels.

Secondly, we’re launching the ProjecTravel forum – a place for travellers to meet, greet, each other, talk about what’s hot in the world of travel and where to go, pass on best practice advice, etc… etc… and in true ProjecTravel spirit, you wont be bothered with all the rubbish associated with some competing sites. Just a forum, and that’s it – no clicking through 10-15 pages to get to the post that you want. No 15.000 ads or recommendations to book hotels. The information you need, provided to you directly.

Will you be going live with everything ready on day one?

As with everything we’ll be launching an early beta, most of our blogs now are physically set up and managed, and the settings for each need to be adjusted individually. Somehow, we plan to automate this process, and once we get everything going right, we will launch with the Beta Version of the blogs. The forums should launch before the blogs do and will be pretty much good to go from day one.

Why are we doing it?

Long story short we want to make the experience better on the site for everyone, and we believe that quality and easily accessible information online is pretty hard to come by so we’re moving the site forward – and well…. trying to provide a better service to all our readers.

How will this work?

We know how annoying it is signing up for another website, that’s why we’ll be letting everyone log in to the site via facebook, google, yahoo, myspace and a few other platforms. Meaning that basically if you have an e-mail account you should be able to log into ProjecTravel without so much as a worry. Hopefully this will make everyone’s experience here all the better, and hopefully will bring us a step closer to developing a platform that will be truly helpful to current and future travellers alike.

What about stuff for the future?

Well… there’s a more elaborate community portal in the works, and we’ve got a few other things in our pocket…. but a bit hush hush on those at the moment. All in all, we’re trying to make something out of nothing, and we really appreciate your support, the articles you’ve submitted and the word that you’ve spread and keep on spreading regarding ProjecTravel.com.

- Thanks Management

As you have undoubtedly seen, we launched with city blogs on the 5th of October, and plan to expand this to include additional cities. Within the next few days we will be launching our next City Blog – Paris – in order to compliment the ones we already have.

Notwithstanding we’ve had some feedback regarding site design and are currently working on bringing you a better user experience. What does this mean? Well, for example the Nav bar at the top has just become a little bit bigger for those of our readers who may have trouble reading some of the smaller fonts. Additionally, we’ll be adding in a number of widgets which will simply make the site much more user friendly.

Finally, we’ve listened, you guys want more social interaction with the site, as well as your own dedicated blogs. Well… they’re coming. We can;t just yet say when they’ll be here, but they’ve been put into the development pipeline, and ideally by the end of the year, you should have your own ProjecTravel community that is not directly linked to Facebook.

That’s about it for this installment.

- Management

Want to Write? There's still time...

If you’ve been coming to the site, you may well have noticed that instead of a typical article we’ve been posting pieces from our soon to be bloggers, and you’re wondering why?

Good question. Well… to put it bluntly we’re readying ourselves and you guys for the next phase of the ProjecTravel portal, dedicated city blogs, and this is an introduction to those individuals. This week we’re doing a feature on Vancouver, and articles on the city are coming both on Thursday and Friday, so it’s a double ProjecTravel dose of travel information, but aside from just that, it’s to give our readers a taste of what to expect in the coming months.

That being said, we’re also looking for someone with a passion for social responsibility to cover the environment and travel. You know where to send queries – submissions@projectravel.com

What happened was we moved operations to Barcelona, got an office, moved into said office only to find out it was horrible infested with all sorts of creatures, namely insects that were making our life a living hell – and all this while the majority of the team has been taking their summer holidays. Due these unforeseen circumstances, we weren’t able to conduct business as usual, but as of Monday, we’re back on track. So as the fumigators worked, we worked from a beach in sunny Spain.

In other exciting news, we’ve gotten a very positive response to out solicitation for city bloggers, and thus far have a number of cities covered, however, we need more, so if you consider yourself in the know – are keen to write about the more interesting things happening in your city – things that would be of interest to not only tourists, but locals alike why not head check out our jobs section and make some cash on the side. The list of cities we’re primarily looking for can be found here. That being said, we’ll be launching with a number of dedicated city blogs some time in October, so keep your ears tuned to news on that front, and hey… thanks for reading.

Best,

Management.

What are they you may ask?

Well not to give away the full surprise, but today we launched a plugin provided by the good people at Wibiya that basically streamlines integration and makes the overall user experience of the magazine better, it can be found at the bottom of every projectravel.com page. You can connect with facebook, see what we’re tweeting without actually having to leave the site. But more importantly if you’re not a native English speaker, and we have been geting traffic from those places where English is not the first language, you can now translate the magazine into eleven languages including American English.

That’s just the beginning however, in September, we will be socializing the site even more by opening it up to our contributors and facebook community friends first, and later to the general public, but don’t worry you won’t need to bother yourself with a tedious sign up process when we do launch – it’ll all be easy peasy to make your user experience the absolute best we can offer.

Then in 2010… well let’s just say we have a few trick up our sleeve that we’re not quite ready to share just yet, but they will be pretty nifty as well.

Best to all our readers,

- Management.

Moving on, we’re now Mobile – meaning, no more zooming in, out, or navigation problems, if you have an iPhone, you can read your favourite compass magazine articles on your way to and or from work as well on the metro, but and anywhere else there is a mobile connection to the net.

SeedRocket – the competition in Barcelona went exceptionally well, we’re now at least 2 months ahead of where we were, and we got there only in two weeks, not even. Finally, we have another survey, this time 5 questions, you’ve been to the site, and we want to know how to make it better, what we can improve – the link is here, help a small travel magazine out by devoting a minute of your time.

Thanks a million,

- Management.

First, we’ve officially gone live with the online magazine, launching at 8:00pm GMT on July 1^st with ten articles.  The four hours the mag was live that day saw 200 unique visitors, not much by say Expedia standards, but considering we didn’t advertise it any, not bad in the least, since launch the numbers continue to grow and which we’re all very excited about.

In the coming weeks and months, the magazine will also be undergoing some functionality changes that will make it more intuitive, provide easier access to content as well as generate more dynamic content for our readers to engage in.

Now. In other recent news, we were asked to participate in the final round of SeedRocket’s “Capus de Emprendadores” (link in Spanish) or Entrepreneurial campus, an eight day forum where we will in effect go through an entrepreneurial boot camp of sorts and vie for one of three spots to acquire funding. Fingers crossed.

Lastly, and least-ly, we had some ups and downs over the past few days with logos for the site and magazine, apologies to any confusion that this may have caused – but in the end decided that the best thing to do was to listen to our community and utilize the same colour scheme that was working for us from the beginning, as such, here’s the new logo.

New ProejcTravel.com Logo

Aside from that we’ve been making considerable headway into the development of the portal, mag etc… in the past few weeks, and it is all around good news. And speaking of news – it’s now official – and we are more than happy to let you all know that we will be publishing an annual – print magazine / coffee table book that will include the most amazing images which we come across in our and our your travels, this book will also include feature articles and stories that were saved just for this publication. Best part is, if your photo or article is selected for publication in this book – we’ll share the proceeds with you, a happy post holidays check in your mailbox. How cool is that!?

So again, be sure to submit your best photos and articles to submissions@projectravel.com and if you’ve got the right stuff, we’ll let you know.

Today we announced on the main projectravel.com site that the first portion of the portal will be going live on July 1st – the projecTravel Magazine. We’ve been working very hard to get something together that will not only be special but will make us stand out from the rest of the online travel mags out there, and I think once we go live you guys will be pleasantly surprised.

That said, it’s still going to be a beta release – meaning we will be tweaking little things here and there to make not only the functionality of the mag better for all our readers but to add features, categories and all sorts of other goodies that we hope will make it not only unique but also get the readers and projecTravel community excited about our future products.

That’s more or less it for this weekly update, and if you still haven’t – then join our group on facebook, and if you have a spare moment – take our city guides survey.

Thanks a million,
Management

Other than that not much to report, just working like crazy and trying to get everything sorted before we launch the magazine. Also, we would greatly appreciate it if you would take our survey, it’s only 5 questions and shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete. It can be found here.  That’s it for this week’s update.

Best, 

Management.