radar

Tourism is not your core business but it is a part of your incomes? Then why would not you take it into consideration? You don’t have to give tourism related content a big place on the website, but here is what I propose :

• Create a landing page with a simple URL.
• Adapt your content for tourists needs (why they should go, directions/map, opening hours). Everything in one page (or a few) so that the tourist have everything he needs at the same place.
• Use this address to promote your business on tourism related websites (tourism associations, city tourism portal, etc.)
• Let search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo) do their job and refer you tourists on this particular page.

That is it. Not a lot of work, right? Be smart, keep it simple and make things that really worth it… Radar!

Google Checkout
Google launched Google Checkout this week. If you have an email account, you can fill out the form on Google Checkout. Now on, you’ll be able to buy stuff from Google affiliates in one click. Secure, fast and easy. All that everyone wants. You should take a look at the demo video.

And if you want to use it as a seller, here is the Merchants page.

Here is the first article of a brand new article category : Fast Website evaluations. There is no perfect website so I will review, I’m not quite sure how often, websites and try to provide tips and suggestions to help them to take a better place on the net.
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New Brunswick Tourism
Website: http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/
This is the official tourism website of the province of New Brunswick, Canada.

I was trying to get info about New Brunswick (I’m planning to go there this summer) on this website and I felt like I had to write this post because there are a lot of things that they could do to improve their website and grow their audience.

Search Engine tips
Here are some tips to optimize this site for search engines.
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/index.htm
1. The title of this page should be “Tourism New Brunswick - Tourisme Nouveau-Brunswick” so that search engine could read the French translation as well.
2. “Official Tourism Web site for New… ” should be written with H1 code (HTML code) because it tells the search engines this is an important text. The rest of the text should be in H2.

http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-ca/hnhome.htm
1. The text “The Official Tourism Web site of The Province of New Brunswick, Canada” should be in text (instead of in the image).

http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-CA/HNThingsToDo/HNActivitiesAndSports/HNASGolf.htm
1. The title of this page should be “Golf - New Brunswick Tourism”
2. The name of the page should be something like :
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/Things-Top-Do/Activities-and-sports/golf.htm
NOT
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-CA/HNThingsToDo/HNActivitiesAndSports/HNASGolf.htm

Usability
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-CA/HNThingsToDo/HNArtsAndEntertainment/HNAETopAttractions.htm
1. The sub-menu of “Arts, Culture and Entertainmenet” is shown… it should be the sub-menu of Attractions or nothing.
2. The attractions should be listed by city. There should also be the possibility to filter them by category. The listings of the packages should be done the same way.
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-ca/hnaboutnewbrunswick/hncontactus.htm
The “Message” field should be larger.

Photo gallery
The photo gallery is one of the things you should focus on. It should be as visually attractive as the province is. When people visit the gallery, we want to be sure they will be impressed and that it will grow their interest to visit the province.
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-CA/HNTopMaps.htm
As a tourist, I would really want to see a map of New Brunswick in this page (right in the page, not in PDF). Maybe I could also click on a city to make all things to do and activities appear.

Information
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-ca/hnhome.htm
1. The menu should maybe be split depending on who’s reading.
Example:

Visit!
- My To-Do List
- Places to go
- Where to stay
- Things to do
- Packages

Organize
- Travel Trade

Media
- Travel Media

Actually, the menu is not quite interesting to navigate. The access to the information should be simplified.

Technical tips
- The website doesn’t appear correctly in Safari (Mac). This is not a big problem, but It may hide some accessibility (Web Accessibility Initiative) problems.

Interesting
… because there are also interesting ideas!
1. “My to-do list” is an interesting approach to add a particular value to the website. On the other hand, it is not easy to find activities or things to add in the to-do list.

I took 15 minutes to write these comments. A complete report would have taken almost a day. A day of work to improve dramatically your website. If your are interested to get such comments and suggestions in a document that provides a website improve plan, contact us!

I was trying to comment on a post on The Tourism and Hospitality Diaries but I couldn’t figure out how to register. So here it is.

“I totally agree with you. That kind of event give a wrong signal for customers who could want to book/buy online. It is not just a tourism/travel industry problem, it’s bad for all the online businesses.

In this case, could hotels.com have done anything different since it was Ernst & Young Global laptop? Maybe not. And… sensitive data of a “standard” (not online) company could be on this laptop as well. No?

Maybe this is not just an “online businesses” problem… what do you think?”

Also found on Zirma’s blog, A Luxury Travel Blog is one of the few blogs about luxurious hotels, finest restaurants and high-end services. It looks like it’s doing good and that range of customers is also looking for travel information on the Internet.

Zirma published a post about Websites where to publish blogs about travel. Here are the websites in the listing :

TravelPod
TravelPost
realtravel
TravelBlog
BootsnAll Travel
Travelblogs
Travellerspoint

Good idea from Zirma! ; )

Since my post about Toarino, I got a lot of visitors from search engines who were searching for Toarino (island, beach, ontario, sand, etc.). Honestly, I don’t care about them. Not that I do not have respect for them, just because it’s pretty sure that they have nothing to care about Radar and Internet Strategy/Marketing.

I’m telling you that to make you realize that you surely have the same problem with your own site. Visitors statistics is an indicator, but you should dig a little bit more and calculate the ratio of “good visitors” you have. It’s particularly important if you invest money to buy publicity/ads. What counts is the number of times visitors will reach your objective (get in touch with you, reserve a room, print a form, etc.) not how many visitors you have.

Wikipedia
Do you know Wikipedia? It is a free encylopedia built by thousands of people. Actually, there are more than 1 180 000 articles.

Take a look at: Wikipedia

Wikitravel
Based on the same system, Wikitravel is a huge travel guide written by the community.

Take a loot at: Wikitravel and an example of content, Italy.

More and more, tourists are becoming active on the web. At first they were looking for information, then they’ve started to book/buy online, and now they write articles, participate to forums, they own a blog, etc. Keep that in mine, it could help you building an interesting business model.

Update
World66
A lot better than World66, visit: World 66

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What is a wiki?
In a few words, a wiki is a collaborative website where each pages could be edited by anyone.

Just a little post to show you our brand new logo.