Take me away...

Website administrators use a number of different methods to determine the popularity of their website (e.g. search rankings) different from the Marketing team (lead conversion) or Support organization (call volume). But one of the most important measures in my mind is the usability and return visitor rates. One measure of popularity (and there are MANY) is the Webby Awards
which has the Webby Award and the Popular Voice winners. I'll take the top winners of each category and give my thoughts of the two.

To start off in the Tourism category, the Webby Award winner was the Tourism site of Montreal and the People Voice winner was Toursim for Australia. First, with Tourism Montreal, it was very confusing on first landing at this site.

I was presented a nice 2 minute video of the city sites, but there was no quick links to my interests - accommodations or tours. From a first impression, I was not invited to interact with the site. However, once I got past the video, there were many more options to find more about the city.










Perhaps this is why the Australia site got the People's Voice award. This site is very visually appealing on first landing. I was quickly drawn to the different types of "walk abouts" I could go on and was given quite a bit of information about each one without having to hunt for it. One of the best analogies of the Web that I like is to compare a Web story (each Web site should try to tell you a story of some sort) to a book. You could read the book from cover to cover, sequentially, but it is limited in the ability to go off and find the definition of a term or research a particular topic in more detail. The Web on the other hand is dynamic and a good website navigation should lead the user down a particular (and predetermined) path with little effort. You should be able to easily go off on a tangent and easily come back to where you left off and continue your journey.

The Australia site definitely has a nicer feel to it and made it easier for me to research my journey and come back for follow-up. Great site Australia!