A blog product for adventure tourism communities
In June 2008 we launched a blog-based, community Web site catering specifically for the Ruapehu snow scene in New Zealand. Mt Ruapehu, the focus of this community news site, is home to the two largest ski fields in NZ. As the only commercial ski resort in the North Island, Ruapehu has a captive audience and dedicated customer base of regular season-pass holders.
Amphitheatre.co.nz is a self-funded project, planned and executed by our team as an opportunity to experiment and demonstrate our web thinking. It was also a successful trial of a concept we had been developing to create local-interest blogs for adventure tourism resorts.
Bridging the gap
We identified the need for up-to-date online information encompassing the whole Ruapehu snow scene. Whilst the other Web sites provided consistent and current information about on-mountain events, there was little about the happenings off the hill. Filling this gap in the market quickly became the objective for Amphitheatre.
Furthermore, with the large numbers of repeat visitors and the ever-increasing youth development programmes, we sought to provide a platform for these young athletes and individuals to promote themselves.
With so many small businesses operating around the Ruapehu Ski Industry, amphitheatre’s main purpose was clear: ‘facilitate discussion and voicing of opinions, whilst promoting local companies, products and services’.
Our approach
The project involved researching, designing, managing and promoting the amphitheatre web site using the Wordpress blog engine as a platform. Some fairly extensive customizing of Wordpress and various plugins was necessary for us to achieve the functionality we desired. Our work didn’t end there…
We wanted to provide a central online reference point for all variations of the Ruapehu snow goer. To do this we enlisted the help of Content Sponsors, who submitted regular content in return for advertising. We continued to manage the Content Sponsors throughout the first season, providing guidance, graphic and text editorial processes, site promotion and other managerial aspects.
To summarise our approach:
- Surveying typical users and analysing the results.
- Creating personas for the common types of visitors to Ruapehu.
- Exploring the information they need or look for about Mt Ruapehu.
- Installing and extensively customising WordPress, the blogging platform we work with regularly.
- Recruiting, training and managing a team of contributors from local organisations on the mountain.
- Negotiating sponsorship and rolling out an advertising model to make the project self-sustaining.
We learned a lot about multi-author blogging and the managing of an editorial team in a very short space of time.
“Promoting a ski and snowboard programme for people with disabilities is fraught with difficulties. Even people with disabilities don't know that skiing and snowboarding is a possibility, so where do you start. Amphitheatre provided an ideal opportunity for us to try out a variety of different ways of promoting our programme and find out what interested people. It also helped us think about what we were doing and pull together our ideas in a simple, concise and informative way.”
- Bob Williams, Coordinator, Turoa Adaptive Programme.