Jeff Beckham

My previous post about the necessary upgrades to the Alamo Drafthouse’s online experience has drawn some interesting responses in the comments.

I wanted to expand on those a bit here.

• Both Shannon and Will Warner mentioned one important aspect of the Alamo’s site that I overlooked the first time - the calendar.

  The printed version of the Alamo calendar consolidates events happening at all three League-owned locations into a single booklet. While there is a link to a consolidated calendar available online, neither Shannon, Will, nor I saw that the first time around. Both Shannon and Will mentioned that they looked at calendars for all three locations when searching for events.

  In addition to the user interface and design improvements to the Alamo’s calendar application, I’d also like to see them make their calendar events available via an XML format that can be imported by Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. How nice would it be to have the Alamo calendar available on your PDA or phone?

• The second update to the original post is to illustrate the power of blogs today, with the Web now dominated by search and each page on the Web becoming its own destination. When you search for “alamo drafthouse” in Google, the first five results are what you might expect: pages from various Alamo websites. But the Drive-By Consulting post I wrote just 10 days ago is now the sixth result. In fact, commenters here referred to having found this blog while searching for information on the Alamo Drafthouse.

  The point is that in the online world, businesses now have to compete directly with individuals in getting their message to the public. All the more reason to embrace the web as a core part of any business.