The Hocking Hills Tourism Association and FireBox Studios have received a Ruby (Recognizing Uncommon Brilliance) Award at the Ohio Travel Association Fall Conference, held Thursday, October 20th in Cincinnati. The Bureau was recognized for the best tourism web site (within the $500,000 and less budget category) in the state of Ohio.

The Ruby Awards were created to recognize outstanding advertising, marketing and public relations in the travel and tourism industry.

The website we built for Hocking Hills at 1800hocking.com is an example of technology applied creatively and effectively to portray the beauty of the Southeast Ohio’s Hocking Hills and promote tourism business in that area.

Designed to make planning a visit to southeast Ohio’s spectacular Hocking Hills simple, 1800Hocking.com offers links to accommodations, attractions, shops and more. Guests can check availability for hundreds of area lodging options and access website links for attractions, accommodations and special events and festivals, as well as the area’s state and national forests and the six areas within Hocking Hills State Park.

The primary challenge FireBox faced was the large amount of data that would need to be integrated into the site, yet be easily accessible for visitors. For example, they had almost 400 member records, each with up to 60 database attributes apiece! We were able to import all their data into our proprietary content management software and make it available in multiple ways on the site.

I’m writing this first actual “blog” entry to share FireBox’s project management experiences, specifically software applications built for it, and my decisions based on it.

A couple years ago, our workload became such that we needed to find a better way to manage multiple clients with multiple projects, track time, create schedules, etc. Up until then, “project management” consisted of hand-written to-do lists, stickie notes and whiteboard chicken scratches. From there, I’d progressed to using the Task manager within Microsoft Outlook, but that wasn’t worth much, and didn’t allow me to abandon the previous methods. Read the rest of this entry »