Portland Spoke – The Official Blog of Travel Portland

For the last few months, we’ve been quietly busy at work on some major revisions to our primary website — www.travelportland.com. While our brand and design remain largely intact, the changes we’ve made are deeper and farther reaching than anything we’ve done in several years.

The focus for this work was three-fold:

• Improve site navigation and search. We implemented the recommendations of an extensive usability study to make it much easier for you, our users and customers, to find key information and content. As you will see when you visit the site, the main navigation, as well as sectional navigation throughout the site, has been revamped to really bring all the great content to the surface. Further, the site search has been significantly improved to bring you more relevant and deeper results (for example, partner business listings, PDF documents and more are now indexed and retrievable from the main search).
• Update all content. We didn’t just take the content we had and re-organize it to make it easier to find — we undertook a major effort to update all of our content to bring you the freshest information about our favorite city: Portland, Oregon.
• Implement new site management tools. While this is the least visible part of the undertaking, it will allow us to much more nimbly and continuously keep the site updated and to add more cool functionality to the site going forward.

As with any major site launch, there are still some corners to smooth out and some kinks to work on, but we hope you’ll take a moment to visit the site and let us know what you think. We’re pretty proud of the results of the effort, but in the end, we did this for you, our users. Stay tuned for more cool developments on www.travelportland.com now that we have the infrastructure in place to really push the envelope.

It’s Klamath Falls to you, but K-Falls to us Oregonians. Day One of “NTA Reno or Bust” ended at the Shilo Inn Klamath Falls and we were thrilled with the light snowfall that greeted us …

We made it to Medford last night and were greeted with a wonderful reception hosted by the SpringHill Suites.

We just stopped at Woodburn Company Stores, the largest tax-free shopping outlet in the West Coast, to pick up a few more delegates. We’ll let Lisa Itel from Travel Oregon, Douglas Jenkins of The Oregon Garden and Lauren Umbdenstock of Woodburn Company Stores tell you more:

Our first nine delegates embarked at 9 a.m. this morning from Portland International Airport, courtesy of OC&W Coachways.

Check the video below for a little taste of what’s to come and for some information about our incredible airport.

Here’s the final version of our new video, which we’ll use to promote Portland to convention delegates, meeting planners and tour operators.

This being the age of YouTube, we’re also hoping the piece grows legs of its own and introduces our fair destination to travelers around the globe.

And this being Portland, the hardest part of the project was culling 70 hours of film down to less than four minutes. (A scratch behind the ears goes to our friends at Sockeye Creative, which produced the piece.)

Tell us what you think — and if we missed any of your favorite spots.

Enjoy. We hope to see you soon in Portland.