Our new content-item page layouts

This is something I've been excited about. The layouts of the core content-items (example) have been greatly improved. Here are three of the main changes:

- On the top-right of each are useful links. We took into consideration that people may be looking for content for all of China or just for a city. So, for the example listed users can see more about "Guilin," "nigtlife" all over China or "nightlife in Guilin." Another example are these photos of Nanjing. People can click to see more photos all over China or click to see photos of just Nanjing.
- The Author is much more prominent. The author's name, avatar and "tagline" all show up prominently. We hope this motivates tour guides to post more as it basically turns all their posts into advertisements for them.
- The previously messy action links are now all organized nicely near the top-right. These are the guidebook, email, tweet and share links.

Our Chinese-language blog for tour guides

Recently Samantha put up a new blog at http://cometosynotrip.wordpress.com/

It covers her personal experiences giving tours to customers that she has met through Synotrip as well as tips to help other tour guides gain more customers with Synotrip.

Photos can now be uploaded all at once

Previously you had to browse for each photo individually to add it to www.synotrip.com/photos.

Now, you can select all the photos you want to add to the album at once. Cool!

Recent Improvements

Below are some of the things that we did this week.
- Spiffed up the page that lists all the city guides.
- Installed a module to check for broken links and then fixed hundreds of broken links. There are still hundreds to go though!
- Resolved some bugs (as always).
- Improved ad positioning to provide some more profitable spots for advertisers.

Improvements This Week

Since the launch of the new site last week we've made a few improvements.

- The user profile pages are much better. See http://www.synotrip.com/samantha for example.
- Photos can now reference Listings and then show up on the listings. See the "Photos taken here" block on the side of the Yuejiang Tower listing for example.
- A few bugs were fixed (for example, breadcrumbs are 90% functional).
- Some menus and page layouts were improved.

New site up!

The new site is up! It's still not completely done, but it will be constantly improved upon and further developed from here on.

Here are the new features we have right now:
- Much more flexible content navigation. Users can navigate by location, channel, category (see http://www.synotrip.com/restaurants for example) and user-added tags.
- A "tour guide" profile type that allows independent local tour guides in China to sign up and promote themselves and gives them incentives to add quality content. We did a small test on the old site to see if matching up travellers and tour guides would work and it did, so now we're expanding on this big time!
- Registered users can build and organize their own "guide books" and conveniently print them off.
- The old spam-magnet forums are replaced with a Q & A. Answers can be voted on to be pushed to the top. Anybody can post, but posts are moderated.
- A highly flexible cms (Drupal) that will allow us to continue developing the site and optimizing the layout as we go forward.
- Chinese-language navigation layer. 95% of the navigation is translated into Chinese.
- Search results are returned for incorrect URLs. See http://www.synotrip.com/indian-foood for example - this isn' t a correct URL, but the system automatically searches for "Indian" and "foood" and brings up a few indian restaurants.
- A cool photos section.
- Algorithims that will allow us to better select popular and highly-rated content (we'll have to collect some more data before we can really put these to use though).

Here's some things that should be worked on:
- improving the layouts, especially for the content-items themselves and the user-profile pages.
- giving users better ways to subscribe to content. Right now they can subscribe via rss feeds.
- bugs. We've fixed almost all of them already but a few still linger... One of the important ones is getting our page intro-text back up. We have temporarily lost the intro-text at the top of most pages such as Nightlife in Shenyang for example.
- and LOTS more secret upcoming features and improvements.

Some Synotrip Stats Before The New Site Goes Up

The New Synotrip will be up right away. We're doing a check of our current traffic and search performance. Here are some of the basics:

Stats from the site itself

1) Page Views - about 200,000 during February.

2) Visits - 66,000+ visits during December.

3) Users - not counting at the moment. Will count when the new site starts.

Stats on search engines and other sites linking to Synotrip

4) Incoming Links - According to Yahoo Site Explorer, Synotrip had 4,902 incoming links on March 18.

5) Google pages indexed - By searching site:www.synotrip.com on Google, we can see we have 2550 pages indexed by Google right now. This should jump quite a bit higher.

6) Search performance - I've chosen 30 terms to represent our Google search performance. I won't say what they all are, but we rank highly for some of these terms and poorly for others. We can call our current performance "100" and the more we improve for each term, the lower the number will get. Get it?

So, going forward we want to push all of these up except for #6, which should be pushed down.