If I see this One More Time!
Right - I appear to be metabolising so therefore must have survived Christmas. On the downside, I am stuck at the machinery again.
I am putting together a tourism website (natal-tourism.co.za) that is largely a ‘what to do’ in KZN but with an accommodation directory. The aim is to make this as comprehensive as possible and use paid advertising to fund it. At the moment I am sitting on 3,300 establishments in KZN and busy data capturing.
I would rather not have survived Christmas. It’s absolutely mind numbing. Going through tourism directories and websites again and again and . . .
If you do this often enough, you see the same prose reappearing again and again . . . If I see the word ‘Nestled’ again (it’s always the first word on the home page) I’m throwing a brick at the screen. ’Birders paradise’, ‘boasting . . .’. Don’t these people have any imagination? How about - even worse - ‘accomodation’, acommodation’, accommodaion’, ‘prefferred’, ‘en suit’ and other typos. I think I’ll start and make a collection.
These calumnies don’t only occur on ‘I did it all myself’ sites but also on the posh ones too. Who does the quality control? Are website designers that illiterate? Little mistakes get through, everyone knows but this is simply slipshod.
Search optimization - what’s that?
Most of these sites simply don’t have any - big ones too. In the most heavily searched sector of the Internet, this is a necessity and not an option. Crappy title tags, no other metatags, meaningless content, the list goes on.
Tourism databases: there’s one that is spread over more than a dozen domains, all poorly put together. Another is simply a list of establishment names with phone numbers. Nothing else. What on earth is the use of that? At the other extreme are the established directories that include every bit of information except the shape of mine host’s navel.
Has anyone ever done usability studies on what potential visitors want from these lists? Somewhere between the name/phone and the singing & dancing morass is a spread of data that would satisfy a potential visitor.