360Village has launched a new web site for Diablo Hills Golf Course & Greenery Restaurant in Walnut Creek, California. The web site features professional photography to show potential golfers and diners the wonderful Robert Muir Graves golf course and the fantastic food served in the restaurant. Diablo Hills Golf Course is an ideal 360Village client in that they have a great product, outstanding service, and a need for outside assistance in showing it all off.

As a nine-hole golf course Diablo Hills is pretty unusual in that it’s a “full-fledged” golf course that just happens to have only nine holes. Most golfers have come to accept that nine-hole golf courses are no comparison to the front or back nine at an 18-hole facility. San Francisco Bay Area nine-hole golf courses are frequently less than challenging. Diablo Hills Golf Course is on par with its 18-hole cousins in that it has multiple par four holes and even a par 5. Holes are challenging with multiple bunkers, especially the finishing hole. It’s definitely one of the Bay Area’s hidden golf gems. Check out the photography, and definitely the Interactive Golf Course Map on their web site.

Kobe Japan Restaurant contracted with 360Village to launch the web site for their new Sushi, Steakhouse, Sports Bar Restaurant in Pleasant Hill, California. Kobe Japan’s owners spent a good deal of time and money creating a beautiful, inviting atmosphere and needed an end-to-end solution to show it off online.

360Village photographed both the restaurant itself and many of the outstanding dishes along with one of their teppanyaki (hibachi) chefs in action preparing a meal on the grill. The web site puts the bulk of the photographs right on the homepage via a scrolling gallery that gives users the option of enlarging the photos. The design is completely inspired by Kobe Japan’s logo, which was created prior to the web site project getting started. The logo’s “wave” element was translated into the background of the top header graphic to give the user a subtle sense of being underwater. The wave was then excised from the logo and used elsewhere on the web site as a standalone graphic design element. 360Village utilized a popular third-party “lightbox” script to present the enlarged versions of the photographs in a professional manner. Such third-party scripts are not only low-cost or free to utilize, but their plug-in-play implementation saves clients considerable expense.

In cases where a businesses services are pretty obvious and don’t need a lot of explaining (e.g., a restaurant) the use of professional photography to tell the story is strategic and highly effective.

Visit their web site at KobeJapanRestaurant.com and prepare to get hungry!

360Village has completed an Interactive Guide to the Mount Diablo State Park featuring 360° virtual tours, photos and a live Google Map base. The Mount Diablo Interpretive Association (MDIA), a non-profit park advocacy group, hired 360Village to photograph key features of the park such as the Summit Museum, picnic areas and campgrounds, and customize a Google Map to display the information.

Those planning visits to Mount Diablo State Park can easily identify the two major routes to the north and south entrances as well as points of interest. It’s hoped that the Interactive Guide can benefit visitors coming to the Park from outside the area and local residents who will likely find there is much more to explore in the park than they realize.

      Client’s site: Mount Diablo Interpretive Association

      Project site: Mount Diablo State Park Interactive Guide

360Village is doing more videos for small businesses to showcase their services on the Web. Dunn Company came to 360Village to get help marketing their concrete demolition services, both in print and online. 360Village shot video at a recent project site where Dunn removed an old swimming pool, concrete block retaining wall, and a tile patio with cover. Adding a simple voiceover with company founder David Dunn completed the project and created a very effective selling tool for Dunn Company.

The video is hosted by YouTube for strategic reasons: (1) YouTube handles the bandwidth and keeps the Dunn Company web site from getting bogged down with viewers; (2) YouTube is able to measure bandwidth of individual users and stream video to them at the appropriate quality/compression so that iPhone users on a 3G networks get a lower quality video than those with a wired broadband connection; (3) by adding tags and a keyword-laden description to the video, people searching videos on YouTube and the web will find the footage more readily.

You can watch the demolition in action on Dunn Company’s YouTube Channel »

360Village has launched an Interactive Guide for the City of Dublin, California showcasing its many public art installations. The guide features a customized Google Map (a.k.a. a Mashup) showing the art locations and then provides still photos and/or Total 360° images of the pieces. Still photos were then combined with a professional voiceover and presented in video format. Customizing a Google Map and using still photos to produce a video keeps costs low, expedites completion and makes for an entertaining user experience.

Check it out on the City of Dublin Web Site »

Thanks to those of you who attended today’s Brown Bag Lunch sponsored by the Pleasant Hill Chamber of Commerce. I was able to cover a lot of ground in terms of Online Marketing topics in a relatively short amount of time. Please feel free to contact me with follow-up questions and feel free to download PDF copy of the presentation to review at your leisure.

The lesser known Caribbean island of Anguilla is home to the new Viceroy Resort, which features a hotel and villas that set new standards for the concept of “casual elegance.” Each villa has a infinity pool and each hotel room as a spa on the balcony — in case the ocean is too far to go to get wet. View the Viceroy Anguilla 360° Virtual Tour »

360Village created a virtual tour of their model villa as well as photographed the property, then under construction, to aid in sales. As each villa and hotel unit has a unique ocean view, panoramic images were created to have on file for prospective buyers to see what “their” view might look like. 360Village partnered with Los Angeles-based Still Water Interactive on the Viceroy project.

Situated on the island of Anguilla, a territory of the U.K., complete with driving on the “other” side of the road, the international flavor of the island, the outstanding cuisine, the uncrowded beaches, and also the proximity to the island of Saint Maarten, combine to make Anguilla a favor Carribean destination for those not needing a stimulus package.

360Village announces the launch of a new web site showcasing a vacation rental home in South Lake Tahoe – Camp Mohawk. The web site features a 360Village virtual tour, a photo gallery that leverages the beautiful slideshow capabilities of Flickr.com, and a simple interactive Google Map.

The property is located in close proximity to skiing, Lake Tahoe, hiking, biking, boating and a variety of other Tahoe amenities and the owners were looking for a clean site to show it off, including nice photos and of course a virtual tour. They also wanted to be able to maintain an occupancy calendar themselves, so we integrated free a Google Calendar into the site. It might make a great lodging choice for your next Lake Tahoe trip: www.CampMohawkLakeTahoe.com

360Village worked with The Brookeside Group in Boston, Massachusets to develop a multimedia Web-based training tool for insurance company inspectors. The “micro-site” has 360° images, videos, photos and maps. Students will access the micro-site via an intranet or it can be stored on a local drive. Web-based training tools of this genre have a number of advantages over run of the mill PowerPoint presentations. They can be viewed on any computer with a Web browser and they have a familiar point-and-click graphic user interface that has zero learning curve. Navigational elements embedded in the tool allow the user to jump around quickly without having to go slide by slide to find what they’re looking for.

View Two Sample Screen Captures from This Training Tool »

Le Jardin Academy on the Hawaiian island of Oahu is a K-12 private school with a beautiful campus and fantastic resources for its students. With the additions of a new high school building and spectacular gymnasium, their admissions staff needed a way to show off the campus online. The views from the upper portions of the school include the pacific ocean and rugged peaks of the Windward side of the island (where President Obama vacationed), perfect for a Total 360° virtual tour.

Le Jardin’s staff worked with 360Village to photograph the campus over a three-day period to catch students “in action” in classrooms, computer labs, and recess as well. In place of a campus map, the online presentation utilizes an aerial photograph with hot spots for users to click and access 360° images and updated aerial photos.