Some of the websites I have created, developed, coded, and maintained
Reid maintains the award-winning ReidsGuides.com trip-planning site, which has been recommended by CNN, USA Today, Smart Money, The Washington Post, MSNBC.com, Frommers.com, Fodors.com, Men’s Health, Away.com, and National Geographic Traveler, and was been proclaimed “Among the best” by Arthur Frommer.
He has also launched ReidsItaly.com (devoted to Italy travel), ReidsBritain.com (devoted to UK travel), ReidsFrance.com (notice a pattern?), and TheIntrepidTraveler.net (devoted to adventure travel).
He has also developed portfolio sites for several friends and acquaintances, an active site for a Scout troop, and a political site for the Colonial Democrats in SE Pennsylvania.
Though not his own site, Reid also blogged about travel and an active lifestyle as Man Outdoors at WeightWatchers.com.
The story of ReidsGuides.com
Reid Bramblett’s award-winning ReidsGuides.com trip-planning site (and its offspring sites NoFrillsAir.com and BeyondHotels.net) has been recommended by CNN, USA Today, Smart Money, The Washington Post, MSNBC.com, Frommers.com, Fodors.com, Men’s Health, Away.com, and National Geographic Traveler, and has been proclaimed “Among the best” by Arthur Frommer.
However, Reid didn’t start this site to promote himself and his writing. (Well, not just that anyway.) It grew from a single page posted to his personal Web space—purely for his own benefit—listing the links to which he referred constantly while researching and updating his guidebooks.
At bookstore talks to promote the guidebooks, Reid got tired of slowly spelling out each of these terribly useful travel urls while attendees scribbled them down, and eventually just started saying, “Actually, most of these links are on my Web site,” and gave out the link.
Within a few days, he began getting e-mails complimenting the set of links, but complaining that it wasn’t clear what some of them were without clicking over to the sites. So he began annotating them.
That was in 1997. By 1999, the site had too much traffic for his personal account, so he registered a url (TravelTools.net—it has been ReidsGuides.com since 2004), and it just took off from there.
The site that continues to grow and expand from that set of links is Reid’s attempt to continue helping travelers make sense of the ever-burgeoning world of online travel information, plan more interesting trips, and learn to travel beyond vacations™.
Awards and accolades
In 2004, ReidsGuides.com won the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition sponsored by the Society of American Travel Writers (www.satw.org). The site— which was, at the time, going by the name of TravelTools.net—won the Silver award in the category Internet Publication/Web site for 2003–2004. Here’s what the judges had to say:
One of the best designed and easiest to use and view sites. Good, “personal” travel expert site with good links. Smart in that it specializes in European travel and does not try to encompass too much, nor is it too narrow. Great travel tools, which provide useful information with a perspective.
Aw, shucks.
Incidentally, Honorable Mention in that category went to the excellent TurkeyTravelPlanner.com, written and maintained by my friend and colleague Tom Brosnahan
This is encouraging proof that the little guy can still make his voice heard in the information wilderness of the Internet (the Gold went to LonelyPlanet.com, and the Bronze to the old Frommers.com—both of which are corporate sites that benefit from having staffs, budgets, and whole bookshelves full of guidebooks they can offer online for free).
ReidsGuides.com, on the other hand, has since its inception in 1997 been written, designed, and maintained in its entirely by just one person: guidebook author and travel expert Reid Bramblett. (Though the information has, on occasion over the years, been updated by James Sayers and Matt Finley, and Charles Prince-Lynn is helped to update the sister ReidsItaly.com site.)