This is what I have been told, half-way through delivering an online marketing workshop to tourism operators in Airlie Beach, North Queensland, gateway to the magnificent islands of the Whitsundays... And I think she was right - well almost! Indeed, I must be a web developer's worst nightmare, but a LAZY web developer's worst nightmare. One day even one of those web developers rang me up telling me I was putting him out of business and he then went on by asking "what is that SEO stuff you are talking about". No Joke. And he we was still coding in Frames... in 2008.

Web developer qualifications

In our web industry there are very little qualifications required to call yourself a "web developer", "search engine optimiser" or any web professional. Actually you don't need any! And when you think that your accountant goes through 4 years of harsh learning and testing to become a CPA... If I Google for "web developer course" I get Seek.com.au listing:

• a course where you will get your - I quote - "foot in the door by learning how to use Dreamweaver, ColdFusion and Flash". Dreamweaver?? Come on, unfortunately Dreamweaver isn't quite what will get you a job and when I did my IT degree we were told Flash was what would get us a job but that was over 10 years ago.
• You can also select to do a Bachelor in Information Technologies but last time I checked they were also learning about Dreamweaver.

Your web developer, or web partner today should be a business advisor and not a skilled user of Dreamweaver. There is so much more to a web strategy than technology. Unfortunately as it is a relatively new discipline it has been difficult for the academia to catch up and small business owners are left with having to make an informed decision without being informed. This is why the team at UntangleMyWeb.com work hard to bring the tourism industry up to speed with what they should know to be able to make an informed decision. And they seem to like it so it is a win-win situation. by HeatherMG

Online marketing is common sense not tech central

Small tourism operators are generally positively overwhelmed when they realise that they don't need to be a geek to take their business online and the majority of it is just common sense. I love to watch the ah-ha moments when a small business owner realises that:

• Search engine optimisation simply means following key rules to ensure their content gets picked up by search engines. These rules - which I often refer to as the grammar of the web - aren't that complicated to grasp when you replace a page title by the "chapter of a book", a H1 by the main heading of your Word document, when you explain that Google cannot read images therefore you need to give them a little description using an Alt attribute, and that by having your phone number on every page in nice big legible fonts preferably at the top is not going to break your design but make your phone ring more often.
• Conversion optimisation is about ensuring your website talks to your customers just the way you would talk to them on the phone. Once a tourism operator understands that they get 40 odd visits a day whereas their phone only rings 8-9 times a day it becomes clearly evident to them that their website content needs to be as in depth as their own phone sales spiel!
• Content management system: this one concept I never really need to sell as I am always told by about half of the room at the very beginning of the session that they are here to "understand how to update their content themselves without having to pay their web developer $140 dollars per hour". If you ever find it hard to explain the benefits of a CMS why not use my favourite comparison to a static website - it's similar to buying a new car and always having to rely on hiring a chauffeur to go anywhere.

Positive feedback from web developers in the tourism industry

Many proactive web developers attend our training sessions and they just love how we make their job easier and more enjoyable by educating small tourism operators on how to grow their website. They also love the tourism e-kit which they hand out to their clients. By the time clients contact a web developer they already know about SEO, Content, CMS etc and can really start to maximise their time with their web partner by going into the web strategy planning phase! So, seriously, do I sound like a web developer's worst nightmare or like a trainer with a passion for my industry? I would love to hear what do you think (read: bring it on...) What the team here really believe in is about providing education to small business that will help them understand how to gear their business towards online success. And - between you and I - have been told that our workshops have actually avoided a few web development nightmares from happening! 

Hasta la vista