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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!

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