Countdown to webzine

Wednesday morning see the launch of the Dominica Hotel & Tourism Association's exciting and innovative webzine, and we're still working hard on it. It's set to be the first of it's kind: a destination webzine.

Crap Site of the Month, November

I recently visited the CONCACAF website - I wanted to find out when Dominica plays Barbados in a forthcoming World Cup qualifier.

Nothing. No schedule. So maybe a date's not been set yet, but the website didn't even have a means of submitting a question. So for that they get the Crap Site of the Month award!

Basically, they're telling us we're not worth interacting with.

Curing the Curse of the CapsLock

Tired of typing away happily then realising with horror that the CapsLock key has been on? FirsCap lets you turn it off, or warn you when it's been pressed. Or CapsLock evil cousins, the NumLock and Insert keys...

And Don't Stop Blogging!

The Birth of a Blog

It's been just two weeks since we launched our blog, which we have dubbed a 'companion blog' to our popular destination website, Visit-Dominica.com.

We are enormously pleased with the results. The traffic has grown steadily, as pictured in the graph below.


The blog is adding value to our website by enabling visitors to comment on hot topics. In addition, by providing 'deep links' to detailed information within our websites, visitors can always get more information on the blogged topic.

From a pure e-marketing standpoint, we couldn't be more pleased. Use of relevant tags, links from our websites and direct e-mail have all contributed to the birth of this blog.

Blog it!

At last, the tourism sector here is beginning to embrace the blog. Early days still, but you can't deny the immediacy, ease and lost-cost (i.e. free!) of a blog for your e-marketing.

Exotica Cottages and Ken's Tours are good examples of recent entries into the blogsphere.

And Delphis Ltd has launched a Dominica tourism blog. There's no better time of year to do - Independence leading to Christmas then into Carnival. No shortage of items (accompanied by great pics, of course). See http://visitdominica.wordpress.com/

The Next Big Project

I thought I'd document the process you have to go through when coming up with the next killer website. Of course I can't detail everything about it just now...

This personal project was born as many are, from a eureka moment - while out cycling this time. But the seed was planted by my Mum quite some time ago.

But as I gave it some thought, I saw the possibilities. And so I got Serious.

First question - is the concept being done at the moment? A search for the keywords behind the concept is positive - no, it's not being done.

Step 2: find the domain name. All obvious ones are taken. 2a is think of less-obvious (like, facebook.com or youtube.com are not obvious names for what the sites do).

Setback 1: Step 2 found a site quite similar to my concept. So Step 3 is: examine that site to see if my idea can still run without being a rip-off. And yes it can (the site I found is just for the US).

So it's back to Step 2, and as such I need to go cycling for more inspiration ;)

Google still dominates....

A recent BBC article reported that Google 'users performed more than 37 billion searches via Google, more than all the other major search engines combined...'

Nothing new there - our recent e-marketing seminar emphasised Google's dominance and the importance of optimising for it.

What was interesting though was that "...the study revealed that most search activity happens in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes countries such as China, Japan and India.

More than 258 million unique users in the region carried out 20.3 billion searches in August, said comScore.

Europe had the second largest total of searchers (210 million), followed by North America (206 million)."

Indeed, that China's Baidu.com and Korea's NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo suggested that we start thinking of those search engines... and of region-specific ones as well.

The top search engines are:

Google sites 37 billion searches

Yahoo sites - 8.5 billion

Baidu 3.2 billion

Microsoft sites 2.1 billion

NHN 2 billion

eBay 1.3 billion

Time Warner 1.2 billion

Ask 743 million

Fox 683 million

Lycos 441 million

Total worldwide searches: 61 billion