For regular visitors to Queenstown.com, you will no doubt have noticed a few changes to this site. Those changes and the details are showcased inside this weeks weekly, and well as some of the reasoning behind them. Also, last weekend's frisbee golf tournaments are also featured after attracting large numbers, and people from around the world, and some stiff competition.
Due to being so knackered yesterday, this week's edition is a day late. I blame the frisbee golf tournaments that the team here attended over the weekend. Saturday saw over 35 people competing in a doubles and singles round at the Paradise Trust property in Glenorchy in windy conditions. We were also greeted by even windier conditions for the two rounds of singles that were held at the Queenstown Gardens course. Congratulations to Ken Jarvis for his clean sweep in the open divisions at both Glenorchy and Queenstown.
Well done to James Smithells for frantically running around and organising this years competitions yet again, and also to the team here at Queenstown.com who played a major role in this too. Brooks helped arrange over half the prizes, while Regan, Uan and myself helped with course preparations. And lastly, a big thank you to all the sponsors who pitched in with prizes to ensure that no-one went home empty handed.
Lst week, some of you may have noticed that we unveiled a newer version of this website, Queenstown.com. One of the biggest changes was to the front page of the site. These changes were made to showcase the four distinct areas of the site, with those being the live booking availability of both Queenstown accommodation and activities, the business directory, and the our town section.
In regards to the live bookings, we use a combination of Roamfree.com's Global Accommodation Search and the Whytewaters RTBS system. Those local businesses that are already affiliated with these two companies will find your products listed in either of those sections.
For everyone else, there is the new and improved Queenstown Business Directory. We introduced a new policy to do away with what we called free listings. The overhead required to not only keep existing entries up to date combined with sourcing new businesses, was getting out of hand. The decision was made to make it paid listings only as not only are our advertising rates rather cheap, our google ranking and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy are well worth paying for. SEO is an area that we are pursuing even further under the HeadQuarters N.D.C. umbrella.
Carrying on in our sectioning theme, we also decided to make a home page solely for the interactive features of the site, kinda like our members/locals area. This is where the news, jobs, classifieds, forum, gallery, games, members, and shoutbox hang out. Also featured are the latest comments placed on news around the site, the weather and events calendar, and the soon to be re-established weekly polls.
The other major change was the colour scheme across the site and the random rotating header images, showcasing some of the highlights around Queenstown. Please don't hesitate to place a comment in the forum or on this editorial if you have any questions, or would like to issue some praise or even complain.
On that note, I'll leave it there for this week's editorial, and until next week, make hay while the sun shines.
Nathan - Queenstown.com Editor.
