A quick post to give you the link to Five Rules for Great Websites as described by James Archer of Forty Media.
Here they are :
- Challenge Assumptions
- Provide Rich Content
- Make it “Sticky”
- Bring a Pro
- Love your Website
- Build your website accordingly to the reality of search engines (as Michaël suggested)
Via lesbonnesfrequentations.com, a French blog on which I wrote as well.
Hi!
As many of you know (or noticed), I’m a French blogger located in Quebec city. I’ve start blogging in English because I knew it would be easier to start in English and translate my articles after than the opposite.
In a couple of weeks, Radar will be translated in French. We’ll be able to reach more French people and companies this way. I hope you’ll like it!
According to this article of Radio-Canada, Quebec City Tourism is pretty slow this summer.
I’ve made some requests on Google Trends and here is what I got for “Quebec tourism“. I bet you can see that 2006 is not gonna be a good year for “Quebec tourism” searches on Google.
Well, we do not have enough data to be sure of anything… but that’s a good indicator of the relation between Internet traffic and tourism industry real data.
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About Google Trends
With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
“[…] Forrester Research VP and analyst Henry Harteveldt expects the online travel leisure industry to fetch EURO 30.7 billion of transactions this year !
The forecast for 2007 is EURO 39 billion.”
Via Guillaume from Hotel Blogs.
Even if I think that some parts of the strategy should be modified and that there are some usability issues to fix, Sheraton, with its all new Web approach (http://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/index.html) giving a place to customers to describe their experiences in the Sheraton hotels, understood that the Web is now ready to let visitors create and publish contents. Sheraton decided to give a big place to their customers in their new Web strategy. We so like this iniative.
Be prepared, it is just the beginning.
When you choose “Français” on the homepage of Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism website, you get on the French welcome page. But hey, all the navigation is in English! Come on, translate it! It is the easiest part once all your texts are translated, the translation is a walk in the park. By the way, did you know that you should also translate the web addresses (URL) to optimize your website for search engines.
Do you remember Pablo? (Read Pablo - the nature tour guide)
Well, I’ve sent him an email explaining my point of view regarding his web strategy. He was so excited about doing web marketing that he accepted my offer right away. A couple of hours later, everything was set up and his blog (website) was up and running.
So if you are planning to go in Costa Rica and thinking about taking a Manuel Antonio Park Tour or a Damas Island Tour, consider visting Nature Adventures website.
We kept it simple. Pablo writes once a week (or so…) about his tours and experiences in the park. Tourists likes friendly, funny and interesting guides so I think that blogging is a great opportunity for tour guides to show these qualities.
The Tour de France has its own route on Google Earth. Last year, some “geeks” started to recreate the Tour on Google Earth. In 2006, the Tour launched an official map.
If you want to download more maps, go to Google Touring.