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Tourism site launched before it's finished

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Published Date: 23 April 2008
By DAVID MADDOX
SCOTLAND's new official tourism website is still a work in progress, officials said yesterday at its launch by Jim Mather, the tourism minister.
The new site is seen as crucial in meeting the Scottish Government target of increasing tourism by 50 per cent by 2015. With the £5 billion-a-year trade increasingly reliant on internet reservations, the website was described by Mr Mather as "the gat
eway to Scotland". This will also make it vital for the "Homecoming 2009" push, where it is hoped descendants of Scots from all around the world will journey here to rediscover their heritage.

Alan Keith, who runs a B&B in Galloway and was a vocal critic of Visitscotland.com, told The Scotsman that the revamped website represented a good start. "Certainly, VisitScotland has addressed our two major concerns," he said. "The new site no longer hides our contact details and forces people to go through a call centre and, on the searches, the lists are now randomised.

"Also, the site looks better, more appealing. However, the feedback I am getting from others is that it still seems to be behind the times in terms of links and technology."



Mr Mather claimed businesses across Scotland could flourish following key changes to the website.



A spokeswoman for Visitscotland.com conceded that further development was necessary. "Of course the website is not a finished product and ongoing evaluation and development will continue," she said.





The full article contains 244 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
Page 1 of 1

  • Last Updated: 22 April 2008 9:30 PM
  • Source: The Scotsman
  • Location: Edinburgh
 
1

Ard Righ,

The Rock Of Edinburgh 23/04/2008 09:32:25
We really should not be advertising for idiots to come to Scotland because its "cool", "trendy" or "fashionable".

We should be encouraging those who are visiting of their own accord and for their own reasons.

On independence a mail shot should be sent to all natives enforced by various diasporas, that we are now free of colonial occupation.
2

Charley,

Dubai 23/04/2008 10:31:45
No. 1 - What colonial occupation is this? I don't remember being occupied?
3

Craig Cockburn,

Linlithgow 24/04/2008 00:16:25
I think that in terms of visual appeal, the site has moved forwards. Looking however at the actual functionality, it's still a confusing site. Confusing because in terms of the visitor wanting to book a holiday there are two entirely separate non-obvious paths through the site to do this. I don't get this confusion on other leading sites, so I don't expect it from visitscotland. If you regard a bed as a simple commodity and you just want one in the area within budget then the very simple search under the "shop" is adequate although why make me search twice if I want special offers - can't the two just be integrated?

Web2.0 sites for accommodation offer useful information such as visitor feedback online. Personally I find this very handy and although it would be controversial for visitscotland.com to go down this route it is nonetheless a unique selling point for those sites that do. So what does visitscotland.com offer as a unique selling point that would make me want to use it? Well it does have more accommodation than any other site for Scotland, yet this point isn't made. It also has more detailed information about accommodation but this point isn't made either and it has the accommodation vetted by its own inspectors but this superb auditing of quality isn't really promoted either. Unlike any other site on Scottish accommodation it has in depth information on facilities, allowing visitors to search for the sorts of things they may find important such as cuisine, disabled facilities, children welcome, town centre location, and many others. Yet this information is buried in the entirely separate accommodation search facility not under "shop" but under "Guide: where to stay". What other site indulges in hiding its best feature away like this?

You want to make a site fully functional yet easy to use and consistent with visitors' expectations not diverting them down two different paths to achieve the same thing. Nor in this day and age do you have a site with
4

Craig Cockburn,

Linlithgow 24/04/2008 00:17:19
... Nor in this day and age do you have a site without a basic feature such as a site search. It's pretty easy to do
site:www.visitscotland.com in Google does it, the problem is that the results returned are so poor because the site still isn't search engine friendly.

Search engines aren't just for finding a site that does accommodation search. SEO placement is more than just ensuring visitscotland appears above Scotland on Line or Expedia. True SEO is about understanding that thousands of man years have been devoted to making Google and the likes very very good at search. Sites such as visitscotland cannot begin to compete with this expertise when writing a simple site search nor should they, it is completely free to take advantage of if you write your site properly so if I enter Edinburgh hotel children in Google I should get as many as possible of the visitscotland.com entries that are Edinburgh hotels welcoming children as possible. Yet, I get nothing from visitscotland.com in the first few pages but plenty from other accommodation aggregators. If search is really that difficult, how come these sites manage it? That was just a random example - the point is that if the rich content on the site was fully available to search engines this sort of thing would work and after 10 years of the site and millions of pounds I can't understand why it doesn't.

For a leading portal offering so much, perhaps following the examples of Amazon and LastMinute and having both a "help" and a "customer service" (i.e. tell us how to improve) prominently on the homepage would in future help to deflect some of this criticism.

My own site at siliconglen doesn't compete with visitscotland.com as I don't sell accommodation but
for tourism terms such as Scottish weddings or Scottish culture it appears well above visitscotland.com in Google, with no marketing or SEO spend whatsoever.

Craig
Web 2.0 project manager (Government, Tesco.com etc)
5

Craig Cockburn,

Linlithgow 24/04/2008 14:53:58
I disagree with the following 2 points made by Alan Keith

"Certainly, VisitScotland has addressed our two major concerns," he said. "The new site no longer hides our contact details and forces people to go through a call centre and, on the searches, the lists are now randomised."

The old site never hid the contact details. They were under an obvious link labelled, suprisingly "contact details" and near the establishment's name and under a piece of text that was blue and underlined, the standard on the internet for a link. Saying this "hid the details" is like saying that every result in Google is hidden because it is behind a blue underlined link. Since the phone number and email address were under the link noone was forcing anyone to use the contact centre.

Secondly on randomising the results, this is fine for fairness but is a major nuisanance to visitors and a frequent source of complaints when people bookmark searches and use the browser to go backwards and forwards only to find their results jumbled. Any randomisation must only take place once per search per visitor to avoid making the site frustrating for visitors. Frustrated visitors will migrate to different sites that aren't subject to the same industry pressure as visitscotland.com and then both visitors and the industry lose out.

I look forward to the day when the site can tell us what people are actually looking for e.g. is it by price, by facility, by area, by establishment type and in what order and then not only can that info be fed to the industry but it can also work at a top level to identify market gaps and opportunities (e.g. someone looked for xyz in area abc, but no results were returned, maybe a visitor attraction could be investigated to serve this need)

Craig

6

Airds,

Castle Douglas 25/04/2008 10:25:42
Although I respect Craig's technical opinion on the re-launched website I am bound to react to his statement that the old site didn't hide the providers' contact details. "Hiding" doesn't mean rendering impossible to find. The definition of the verb "hide" is "to put out of sight", which is exactly what visitscotland.com did by placing the telephone number, email address and website URL under a hyperlink called "contact details", instead of displaying the details themselves. People browsing the Internet tend to spot the most obvious information such as the "To book - ring this number" banner that was given far more prominence than the "contact details" link positioned such that scrolling down the page was necessary to find it. Unlike Craig, accommodation providers like me have the benefit of receiving feedback from actual tourists who often commented that they "couldn't find how to get in touch with the business direct" or "thought that the only way to book was through an agent (the call centre)". The purpose of hiding the details, of course, was to attempt to drive customers to the call centre, as admitted freely by visitscotland.com in private in support of their financial needs to make profits. Unfortunately for them the policy has not worked, as was predicted from the outset, so a different policy has now emerged. Time will tell whether the company will survive after such a disastrous track record, but is unlikely that any private investor would be inclined to buy shares if they were available on the open market.

 

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