Critical Analysis of Tourism Websites - Assignment Example

With that said, I found the official tourist website for Greece and took a look around. The website is mediocre and the web designer must have used a strange layout code because mousing around causes weird changes to the layout. The header has four tabs: Home, Site Map, Newsletter Subscribe, and Contact. The homepage itself offers additional tabs: Greece (which expands to include links to History, Civilisation[sic], Geography, General Info, and Before You Travel), Explore (which expands to include links to Destinations, Culture, Sea, Nature, and Religion), Enjoy (which expands to include links to Activities, Leisure, Touring, and Gastronomy), Specials (which expands to include links to You in Greece, Downloads, and Newsletters), and GNTO (which expands to include links to About Us, Business Newsletter, Links, and Competitions).

There is so much information, at first the website can seem a bit daunting. There are all kinds of related links, a plethora of historical information, most with links to outside websites that offer tourist trips, and an events calendar (though it didn’t seem to be functioning on the several visits I made to the website). Most notably, the website offers a large column of social networks that they hope you “like” them on—which seemed distracting, actually. I came to the site to learn more about Greece, not worry about their Google +1 or Twitter status.

The website does include some photos of Greece and its monuments, though I was severely disappointed in quality, number, and size. Essentially, this website looked like they took their “Travel Greece” brochures and turned them into a website. Nothing special, too many choices that lead to the same places, and a distracting layout that makes choosing a tab to visit next confusing. Most frustrating, is that getting into the culture of Greece is nearly impossible, simply from the lack of visual evidence.

Over and over I second-guessed this choice as the main tourism website for Greece, but GTNO stands for Greek National Tourism Organisation[sic], which is supervised by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Overall, if I hadn’t seen Greece in movies and literature previously, I wouldn’t want to visit there if this were the only site available. The lack of visual evidence is frustrating, and though they offer a large amount of historical information about the cities and monuments, the information is not, ironically, very informative.

At just about every opportunity, the website links you away from the main site to give the real information. From this tourism website, I’ve gotten a sick feeling about Greece. I’ll keep it as my destination because I believe the country is far more beautiful than the tourist site lets on, but I was highly disappointed because it seems—at least it should be this way—that the main tourism site’s only function is to attract tourists and visitors to their landmarks. Nightmare Excursion: Israel Sure, it may be the fount of the world’s oldest and most prominent holy site; but it’s guaranteed to be wrought with civil war and unfathomable dangers to the average tourist.

With that said, I took a gander at Israel’s official tourism site which bears the promise, “Israel: Come find the Israel in You.” The Ministry of Tourism’s site is actually quite impressive, not at all what I expected. Obviously, their website wouldn’t be openly promoting their thousand-year-old holy wars, but the aesthetic was far more pleasing than imagined.