Tourism Industry Council

Formed in 2001, The Tourism Industry Council New South Wales (TICNSW) works with Government, industry and the community to boost tourism throughout the state of New South Wales.

The project was to design, build, host and provide support to TICNSW staff. My tasks included the following:

• Regular progress meetings with the TICNSW General Manager.
• Meeting TICNSW office staff regarding content requirements.
• Pitching new website features that would benefit TICNSW.
• Compare the best software options and costs for content management.
• Revise previous website site-map and the categories for content.
• Building wireframes of the new website layout.
• Implementation of an improved content navigation system.
• SEO tactics to improve Google ranking.
• Submission of website designs to the TICNSW Board.
• Estimation of costs associated with website hosting and support per year.
• Estimation of costs associated with an e-newsletters campaign per month.
• Submission of e-newsletter designs to the TICNSW Board.
• Staff training for the new website software.
• Final website testing and modifications before launch.

TICNSW update their content daily so it was imperative that the new website be quick and easy to maintain. Over 1,000 articles are available on this site and over 1,000 visitors come to the site each day. The TICNSW e-newsletters was another successful project that I initiated. Over 2,000 members each month received highlights of recent articles. There was a significant increase in website traffic as a result.

A division of TICNSW is the New South Wales Tourism Industry Awards. Each year TICNSW conducts the New South Wales Tourism Industry Awards and I designed, built and hosted the NSW Tourism Awards website also.

A functional highlight of the NSW Tourism Awards website was a public voting system for the “Peoples Choice Award”. Over 50 tourism businesses were showcased with one vote allowed per email address. Many more votes were collected than previous years as each business rallied for the award, due to live counting. This campaign was a great success for TICNSW (and the NSW Tourism Award finalists) with a tremendous increase in website traffic due to the voting process.