The problem is this.

You have a widget that you want other people to be able to embed in the pages of their website, and you want to use an iframe to do this.  However the content of the iframe widget is dynamic, and the size of it can vary, depending on the content.  You want the iframe/widget to resize itself to suit the content.

Problem. There is NO way to resize an iframe of your content embedded on someone else’s page from WITHIN the iframe content itself.  No amount of JavaScript or clever twiddling in the page served up in the iframe will allow you to do this.  By design browsers wont let content from another domain affect the parent container.  It is far too insecure, this referred to as same origin policy.  If you are serving up content in the iframe from the same domain as the parent page, then you can just use JavaScript to do this.

Only the parent container can resize the iframe.  So seeing as the parent container is someone else’s page that you have no control over, how do you make it aware of the content in the iframe and tell it how to resize the iframe?

Solution.  You can do this simply by serving up a dynamic style sheet with the iframe code used to embed your widget.  This style sheet (CSS) served up by the same server as the widget content, and it knows what the dynamic content is in the iframe and can figure out how big the iframe needs to be.  This CSS file therefore needs to be a dynamically generated file, as it will need to do some server side calculations to figure out what the dimensions are.

Here is an example of the widget code you would supply.

<link href=”http://your.site/path/to/css.php?content_id=1234&dom_id=iframe_widget” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
<iframe id=”iframe_widget” src=”http://your.site/path/to/content.php?content_id=1234″ frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” scrolling=”no”></iframe>

The style sheet will need to use some server side code to output the correct dimensions for the iframe element style.  Here is an example for dynamically generating this style.

<?php

$domId = $_GET["dom_id"];  //This is the dom element ID of the iframe to generate the style for
$content_id = $_GET["content_id"]; //This the unique identifier for the content being generated by the widget/iframe

/**

Using the $content_id, do some magic here to determine what the content is (customer details, list of products, photos etc), and calculate the height etc.  This is simple for things like a list of items where the height of the elements is fixed, but the number is variable.  If the widget is a combination of things that are dependent on font size, width of elements, white-space wrapping etc, it can get a little tricky, but in the end it is all just math.

**/

$elementHeight = $x * $y + 100;  //This is just an example.

?>

/* STYLE SHEET STARTS HERE */

#<?php echo $domId;?>
{
height: <?php echo $elementHeight;?>px;
overflow: hidden;
scroll: none;
}

That’s it.  Nice and simple-ish.  Only tricky if the content of the iframe wildly varies.

http://vaughan-vendhq.vendhq.com/

Interestingly there were two strong themes that came up time and time again in the discussions. They were quite different but I saw them to be critically intertwined.

The first issue is the broad one of technology, and everything got lumped in together in this one from the social web, mobile payments, augmented reality, connectivity and mobile information tools. The one thing everyone agreed is that technology is changing the way people interact and make decisions when they travel. Interestingly one of the greatest fears/opportunities was the power of social networks, social communication and viral ideas. I say this is both a fear and an opportunity as clearly the affect can be either positive or negative.

The other top issue was on of our image as 100% pure, clean and green and preserving this and leveraging more off our natural beauty in a world where the environment is going to hell in a handbasket.

Why are these intertwined? Well once upon a time you used the glossiest of brochure with the most stunning of photos promising the best experiences in all your tourism marketing, and then hoped, when the traveller arrives, to deliver on the experience. Today there is a fear of social media within tourism, and I don’t expect this is limited to NZ tourism operators. What if we say we are 100% pure and the world discovers we are not quite 100%, perhaps only 85%, but worse, tweets, blogs and tells all their friends and followers.  What if someone has a bad time? What if the next viral thing is a video of a bad experience or image that breaks the illusion of our 100% clean and green image. This image is our marketing capital.

The reality is with more and more people using their social web connections as their primary source of information, this image could be damaged if we as a whole can not live up to what we are promising. Driven from the Auckland Airport into the city before? Been discussing high intensity beef farming lately? Shipped any coal to china lately? Okay you cant expect everything to be 100% squeaky clean and I don’t think that our 100% pure image is so misleading that an angry internet mob will develop and something viral will spread tarnishing our image and turning the world off of visiting our shores. Of course New Zealand is a beautiful and amazing place. Some of our less cellubrious “scenes” are so so. But today is there is a risk of painting a perfect image to sells plane tickets and beds, and have people picking on all the bad images around NZ that are in direct contrast and have this influence the way they talk about and describe New Zealand socially? Like I say if expectations are consistently not met, there will be negative comments and these will turn off others.  Nothing has changed here, it is the age old power of word of mouth, it is just that technology allows people to share this information more readily.

So forgetting the 100% pure image for now, this marketing campaign has worked well for us for so long but it may be up for an overhaul soon. The pervasiveness of technology in our lives today and the ability for people to enable others to vicariously share their experiences means that whatever our strategy is, we have to be somewhat genuine in how we promote anything online, whether it is NZ as a whole, a bed and breakfast, or a scenic walk. But don’t fear being caught out for not living up to expectations (I think it is in our national psyche to underrate ourselves) but even better than that focus on making sure the traveller gets the best experience they can possibly have and then enable them to use the social web to do all the good marketing for you. You can’t control what people say, but you sure can positively influence it.

So one asset we have got is our natural beauty. Another asset is our people. Nobody is more passionate about New Zealand than New Zealanders. What if we connected travellers to New Zealand with kiwis online? What if we got kiwis to describe places in blog posts. Share trip ideas “If you are coming to Auckland then you NEED to do …”.  Share their own views, photos or videos of their New Zealand.  This would create an opportunity for travellers to see NZ through our eyes before they come.

What if tourism operators participated in FourSquare, new checkins today get a complimentary coffee with breakfast, 10% off a bungee. What if we really engaged as a country with visitors online socially? No not just a FaceBook page, something smarter and engaging. Travel is all about seeing new things and meeting new people, and sharing the experience with others. We can make it easier for visitors to connect both with New Zealanders and their own friends back home.

We need to find ways to enable all the organizations tasked with promoting New Zealand as a whole, or particular districts, to engage with travelers online and encourage them to share their experiences while they are here and still on the buzz of jumping off a bridge with a bungee around their ankles. Let them tell the world NZ is 100% cool, 100% awesome, 100% the best country they have ever visited, in their own words. Enable people to have genuine positive conversations.  The technology is there so what’s the hold up?

The first barrier, as I talk about above, is the willingness of the tourism industry to engage, but I think we can overcome that.  There is a second major barrier.   We need to find ways to let tourists connect online while they travel without crippling data roaming costs or oppressive WIFI fees. Right now tourists don’t often tweet, and post up photos on the go while they are actually feeling the buzz because to do so would make them broke. Free or cheap ubiquitous WIFI is unheard of. We need to make it easier for travellers to remain connected while they are here.

Here are some ideas:

• Telecom/Vodafone partner with Tourism NZ to offer tourist SIMs with prepaid data and calls. Sure you can do this now but it is not at the front of a travellers mind to have to go out of their way to source a prepaid SIM for their phone. These should be on sale at the airport and at the reception of their accommodation packaged up in deals specially for tourists. It should be cheap and accessible.
• A partnership with a national WIFI network. What if Tomizone was packaged up to tourists and gave the traveller special online discounts for accommodation and activities only available through the Tomizone network?  There is benefit for all there.
• The i-SITEs. What is their future? Well one thing to make them more valid is to offer free WIFI for travellers. Perhaps even serve drinks and evolve into a travellers meeting place.
• At the very least accommodation providers need to offer their WIFI for free.

I think the fear of bad exposure through social media is not 100% justified. NZ really is a great destination (not that I am biased or anything) and for the most part I am sure everyone has an awesome time. The real fear, I believe, is that we are not able to capitalize off of the power of the social web. If we fear that people will say bad things to their friends then will will only discover that yes some people say bad things.  But what if we could facilitate travellers to share all their great comments and experiences?  One thing is for sure, a country our size and with our marketing budget, we need to maximize any opportunity the Internet and technology provides.  Pioneering an integrated approach of new technology and social media into our national tourism strategy may not be a bad start.

Tip #1 – Understand why people will want to visit

The first tip is really about understanding your audience. Yep, good old fashioned marketing! You must first understand why your customers will want to come to your site. Of course, there will be some very good reasons, and these will be your products, services and the information your website provides about them. By understanding what your customers are looking for, you are better able to explain how your company will fulfil their needs.

This seems obvious huh? In fact this is not really anything specific to search engine marketing, it is more about good marketing. And so if you understand your customers well enough, this will be reflected as clear effective communication of what value you provide to them, your customers, in your website. This is important not just because clear communication is good communication, but because from this will come your most important piece of market intelligence, the best keywords to use for your search engine marketing.

Getting your keywords right is one of the most important achievements you can make on the journey to effective search engine marketing.

Bob owns a cheese company that makes a variety of delicious cheeses. At Bob’s Cheese they have just launched their new on-line shop for premium cheeses at direct to market discounted prices. They have a brain storming session for keywords and decide that one of their key phrases for on-line search engine marketing is “delicious Gruyère on-line”.

Now their cheese may in fact be delicious, and selling it on-line is indeed a bonus, but in reality most people can’t spell Gruyère and more often than not their target audience is actually looking for “discount premium cheese”. But how do they work this out?

There is a number of ways to work out the best keywords for your site. You and (if you are fortunate enough) your marketing team, are the most qualified people to figure that out. Think about your market and how they think. Here is a sure-fire way to get some good ideas on keywords if you get stuck;

Get together a group of people who represent a good sample of your target audience. Get a broad spread of people, from computer literate to first time Googlers if you can (if they still exist). Give them a simple task. Explain a product or service (without explicitly suggesting YOURS) and get them to imagine they are looking for it online. One by one get them to bring up a search engine and then watch. See what they do and what they search on. Take note of all the words and phrases used and the success the people had with each. At the end, ask them why they searched on the words they did. You may be surprised at the terminology and phrases they search on and their explanations why, but out of this exercise you should find some patterns, and a common set of words used. These will become your keywords.

Tip #2 – Use your keywords and phrases throughout your site

This is the most common approach to search engine marketing. Search engines actually “read” your pages, and so if you use a lot of keywords in the pages that people search on then the more relevant your website will appear. The more the search engines think your site is relevant, the higher in the search results you go.

Build up a collection of well thought out and relevant keywords (as per tip #1), and be sure your website talks about them. Don’t come up with too many keyword phrases, as you will need to use them all consistently throughout the content of your website. So work out your best phrases and keywords, and incorporate them into your site. Not only will this give you better chances of search engine success, but it will generally keep your website “on message”.

If you succeed in getting visitors to your site with one particular set of keywords, but your site uses different terminology or uses the keywords out of context in the page content, the visitor who found you in the search will end up getting confused and click the back button to the Google search results. This is referred to as a “bounce”, and search engines pick up on this. The more visitors bounce back from your site with a particular set of keywords, then the search engines will rank your site lower.

Tip #3 – Use your keywords not only in the page content, but in the title and URLs of your website

This step requires you to carefully design the names of the pages in your site to reflect the subject matter they are about. Search engines give you “points” for using keywords in the content of your pages, but more weight to keywords that appear in the name (URL) and title of a page. So as an example, our cheese company has just created some new pages promoting their on-line premium cheese shop. By using their primary keywords of “discount premium cheese”, they could name the page that talks about this service something like:

http://www.bobscheese.com/discount-premium-cheese.html

This would work better than say:

http://www.bobscheese.com/index2.html

which says absolutely nothing about what the page is about.

The page should have the title (that appears in the top of the visitors web browser) of “Discount premium cheese” and by using this phrase in the words on the page itself, they would score valuable points with a search engine. A search engine will understand that the page itself is something to do with “Discount premium cheese”.

To go one step further, our cheese shop could include their main keywords in the base website address itself. So instead of using the web address of:

http://www.bobscheese.com

they could register and use

http://www.discountpremiumcheese.com

So the full address to the page would become

http://www.discountpremiumcheese.com/discount-premium-cheese.html

Now not only do the keywords appear in the text of the pages, the title of the page, the name of the page itself, but they are also in the actual website address for the website.

This step may not be practical for some people as their website URL is probably part of their existing brand, and existing website. However in the case of our fictitious cheese shop, they could register a new URL of discountpremiumcheese.com and use this alongside bobscheese.com for their on-line store only, keeping bobscheese.com as their corporate website. They could then link to the new www.discountpremiumcheese.com from the home page of www.bobscheese.com and actually get rewarded for this (see tip #4 below).

This is a good tip to consider if you are starting out a new website, but with some clever thinking you could break off some of your exisitng website content under this new URL if that makes sense for what you are doing, like Bob setting up his new online shop.

Tip #4 – Get other sites to link to your site using your keywords

This is a well known approach to raising the profile of your site and raising the relevance of your website in search engines. The more links there are that point to your site, the better as far as search engines are concerned. Search engines use a technique called “spidering”, or “crawling”. This is where a little search engine software robot called a spider (on the world wide web you see) starts reading a web page. In the page it finds a link to another page or website. The search engine doing the spidering, upon finding a link then sends off another little electronic spider to follow it to find out where it goes. That spider finds more links in these pages, and sends off more spiders. The more links the spiders find, the bigger the army of spiders becomes, and while this army crawls around the web, the more it comes across links to your website from others, and each time the more “points” it gives your site. If lots of sites talk about your site, the more popular it must be, so the more relevant it becomes.

It is vitally important to have your site linked to from other sites, both for search engines and so real people can find your site, but one big mistake most people make is to not get the other sites to use keywords in the link text itself. The search engine spiders may not necessarily understand why another site links to your site. It will just find a link and think “oh here is a link, I will follow it.” But by using keywords in the link text itself, the spider can understand the link in context and understand what the link is about.

If Bob’s Cheese can get other sites to link to his site using good keywords then the search engines will associate these keywords with bob’s site. So a link like click here for premium discount cheese would give the search engine better context than just visit Bob’s Cheese. By doing this the search engine gets the idea that the link has something to do with premium discount cheese, and so associates these keywords with Bob’s site. The more sites with links like this pointing to Bob’s site the more the search engine thinks that Bob’s site is an authority on premium discount cheese.

Wrap up

So that’s it for now. Four simple tips to search engine success. There are, as always, plenty of other things you can do, but these four things will give you the most value. No voodoo or black magic is required to get your site up in the search engine rankings, just some sensible steps and a bit of time and effort, and you will get great results.

Lastly if you want instant traffic to your site then have a look at a paid advertising campaign using Google’s Adwords. You still need to work out your keywords and get your website content right, but Adwords will give you that instant traffic you desire… but more on this another time

http://blog.vianet.travel/news-and-events/product-news/vianet-in-google-earth

You can pan around, zoom in and click on the flags to get balloons of info. You can even book your accommodation.

Just some fun I thought I would share. If you are interested in finding out more about Vianet and their really cool tools you should.

Lesson # 1, The lines are more of a guide when it comes to colouring in.

My daughter Holly is a firm believer in this principle, as it is clear from our shared attempts to colour in the penguins in her book. When I would pick penguin-like colours and apply them within the penguin-like outlines on the page, Holly would grab purple and apply liberally to it’s face. At first I tried to provide guidance to show her what I thought was a more realistic application of colour, but then as Holly insisted that her way was best I began to wonder if she didn’t have a point.

Sometimes when you are writing software you do think, “wouldn’t it be cool if instead of spitting out just an invoice from this method, it could also optionally spit out a pdf too”, thus giving your penguin an extra purple head. What Holly wanted was her penguin to look different to the spec. It is okay to stray outside the lines now and then as long as you colour in the penguin.

Lesson #2, Building with the blocks too small takes longer and makes weak towers.

Building towers is one of my favorite games, and as the control freak I am I tend to hog all the blocks and make elaborately balanced block multi-plexs with appendages and pointy bits. By carefully selecting all the blocks and arranging them just so, my towers were never very robust. Meanwhile Holly had gotten fed up with me not letting her have all the blocks, and she went about making a new tower out of the coffee table, books and a doll. My tower had a million pieces, hers had six. Mine fell over with a gentle tap. Her’s didn’t.

Sometimes you should pick the bigger blocks to build with. Don’t get too carried away custom building everything or another kid will just build a taller tower in half the time.

Lesson #3, Asking “why” 100 times is annoying but valuable.

While arranging the plastic farm animals about the plastic farm, I was trying to get my daughter to put all the cows in the fenced compounds (that I had just carefully constructed).

“Why Dad?”

“Because thats where cows live”

“But why?”

“Because they do”

“But why?”

“Ahh, because they always have”

“Why?”

“good question”

So we set the cows free, and still had fun. Challenge the status quo and you may find a pleasant surprise. Just because that’s how you have always done it doesn’t make it the best way. Especially when translating business processes into new software, making a screen perform like a paper form may not make the best sense.

Lesson #4, A horse built out of twigs and playdoh, is still a horse.

I was trying to make a realistic horse with realistic muscle texture in the playdoh, a real looking mane with carefully cut wool, small beads for eyes. Holly smashed one together in under a minute, with sticks for legs, a rolled lump of doh as the body, with another making a head. She provided the accompanying neighs and whinnies and was off galloping around the garden while I was still crafting hooves. For the purpose of the exercise she had her horse and it was doing the things horses do.

Understanding when enough detail is enough means you can get your horse out faster.

Lesson #5, Cuddles are cool.

No analogy. I just love cuddles with my girls.