When I left Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge I started up a company called Frantic Naturalist Tours and Safaris. I registered the company, but still had to get the company registered with NTB (Namibian Tourism Board). I decided that I needed to earn a little money while I waited and started to do some freelance work. I didn't enjoy the camping trips that I did. Seven years back I loved it, but somehow that had changed. I found that those sort of trips left you very little time for guiding.
In my years in the desert I had become passionate about good field knowledge, and I was finding that I didn't have the ability to keep up if I was chasing all over the country. To me, local knowledge was always important for guiding - no matter where that local knowledge is. My style of guiding suits me best when I am in one place, and have the chance to really learn about it.
I was offered an accommodated birding trip by Safari Wise. I really loved the trip. My birding knowledge wasn't as good as it should be, but that's partly from years in the desert. I decided that the best way for me to get into the birding thing is to work with another company.
I also wanted more time at home, but with Frantic Naturalist I wouldn't have the resources to start cracking into the day tour market in Swakopmund. So I had expected that I would have to be on the road most of the time. But my wife struggled with the kids and balancing a demanding job, where she often only got back well after 6h00 in the evening (and started at 7h45 in the morning.) So when Safari Wise offered me the opportunity to help them with day tours here in Swakopmund, with a big focus on birding, well I jumped at the chance. There is so much about Safari Wise that I like. It's small and family run, and they have a reputation in the birding tour industry.
I don't think that they will keep me busy all year. I will have to see how it goes. I may well do some birding day tours for others. That's up in the air, and I will be inventing my career one day at a time. It's a little scary, sometimes we are a little short of bucks (money), but I love it. There is also the possibility of doing training and some writing.
So Frantic Naturalist is on hold. I have some ideas for it, but I'll keep them to myself for now. I am not rushing anything. Taking one day at a time. Watch this space and you'll be the first to know.
So, the domain was registered and I have a website to play with. This is the result of that playing. I looked at a lot of small nature tour company websites both to make my first website, and to try to get an idea of what I wanted Frantic Naturalist to become. I have been doing that for years. So I though one of the useful things that I could do is to make a link list of those websites. As I started working on it, I decided to make the main focus of the website into the directory. For the first time in about a decade, I have plenty of time. I love trying to dig out things. These websites don't usually hit the first page on Google searches. So, that's my aim - create an informal resource of useful nature based tour companies.
How of the website
Nuts, bolts, html, css, the other side of the website. When I started with Frantic Naturalist website, I had initially thought that I would get someone to do it for me. But my wife had a 'learn html' book lying around. We were at the lodge, and so I though, during my evenings I would get get cracking on an idea for the website. I very quickly fell in love with html. When I was a kid I had really enjoyed programming in Basic. As kids we had a huge truck full of Lego. I think those things gave me a love for building things. For me, HTML is just a wonderful set of 'virtual' Lego blocks.
I am very lucky to have a father-in-law who does web design for a living (Swakop Dot Com.)
For those learning html (and I am hoping that some of those who run nature based tour companies are doing the same as me, and can use some of my ideas as a resource,) this website can be great to look at. The whole thing is very, very simple html and css. If you look at the code, you should see that I have commented very well.
You may notice some scripts and stuff thrown in by FrontPage. I only used FrontPage to type long sections of text and to upload to the server (the only access I have to the server.) But I did most of the design in Notebook (the Windows plain text editor.) I will probably start to use Ubuntu later in the year. I just want to change gradually. For now, though, I do all my stuff on Windows.
Why do it alone? For me it's just for fun. I work in raw code for fun. It's the Lego blocks.
But for the small operator, there is another very important benefit, it makes it dynamic. A website is not like print. You can change it every day You can learn from your guests. You can announce new itinerates. You can report on past tours.
But isn't professional design best? Well, for something like a brochure, sure, I will always agree. But for a website, actually, plain and simple is best. Keep the design to a real minimum. People are not interested in all the fancy design crap anyway. They want to know about your content.
What works best is to have a deal with the person who hosts the server, and let them help you with things like publishing the site, optimizing for search (there is a lot to learn about how people can find you on the internet,) and so on. With that kind of support, it can be a lot cheaper to do your own work.
For those who run small tour companies, getting your site listed on a directory like this one can really help others to find you.
The site is validated for xhtml 1.0 strict and for css I have done a lot of updating, and haven't checked again, but the site's html and css should be improving. I will certainly check it again soon.
I believe strongly that the internet is all about making different machines, different operating systems, different people, communicate with each other. That is the whole point of the thing.
Aside from guiding and things related to that, I also build websites, and would be happy to build a website for you.