Tuesday 4 August 2009

New VisitScotland Homepage

Visitscotland.com has undergone a refresh to its portal site. "Introduced on 29 July 2009 the new homepage for Visit Scotland has been redesigned to give a more comprehensive shop window for Scottish tourism, with dynamic and exciting content visible from the first click of the mouse."
The homepage certainly features a host of dynamic images and new media embedded. The release puts it thus, "Emphasising the use of rich media (images and videos), these changes are designed to inspire users and draw them further into the site. The new homepage gives quick and more direct access to accommodation, event information, attraction and activities and features a new improved site search. Current marketing campaigns will also be featured on the homepage."
The site appears to be still powered by the same Tiscover content management system and booking engine and still we note features the TripAdvisor ratings - much maligned in a recent post.
It will be interesting to see what direction VisitScotland take the new site; the question of a public sector body operating for instance a (private sector) booking engine is certainly now a dilemma.How will it face up to the costs of managing content in house? Will it still maintain the call centre functionality developed by VisitScotland.com or instead look towards directing calls towards the private sector directly.
The answers should be interesting.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Surely now is the time to just close the doors on VS.com The OBEs have all been awarded, all the money has been spent, successive tourism ministers have tried their best, but not even "House" could find a cure for something that is beyond medical help.
The biggest problem is that these people won't hold up their hands and admit that the vocal detractors of vs.com at the time of design were correct.

In years to come, like our football supports who all claim to have a piece of the Wembley turf or even a goalpost in their back gardens, there will be MSPs, tourism leaders, business owners who will all claim to have objected to vs.com but in reality the real objectors were never givien back up from the industry. Shame on them all