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£300,000 wasted on a failing website

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Published Date: 28 October 2007
GIVING this amount of cash - £300,000 over three years - to VisitScotland.com is scandalous ('Tourist chiefs widen net', October 21).
Propping up a failing website which does not deliver the goods will not work. What is required is to cancel the current contract and start again with a member-driven website, based on local knowledge, not one that appears to operate only for the cont
ractors' benefit. Maybe the contractors for www.visitireland.com should be given the task. That site is very good as far as accommodation providers are concerned.

The £100k a year would be better spent on tourist information centres (TICs) and more local knowledge bases. Unfortunately, it appears that TICs are in danger of being run down as well, if the Moray Council is anything to go by.

Many of the members I represent are leaving VisitScotland.com as it simply does not make good marketing sense to spend cash with them.

Alan Kimber, Chair of Scottish Independent Hostels

AS THE person who runs www.borderstouristboard.com the website for our own independent tourism organisation, I cannot understand what all the fuss is about. We launched on June 7 and used Google adwords to get going. It is very efficient and able to target the immediate market. To date we have generated more than 12,000 visitors to our site on a budget of £200 per month. £100,000 per year would go an awful long way.

The main problem for VS.com is that Google recognises that there are few incoming links to that site because most of the 'members' of VisitScotland do not think it worthy to provide a link. Watch this space - will VS.com suddenly include incoming links as part of their terms and conditions. If so everyone will be asked to do their work for them. It simply doesn't work on the web if you don't have any friends.

Jeff Slater, Kelso



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1

Upbeat,

28/10/2007 10:26:11

If you tot up the £300,000 it represents the cost ,on average professional wages, of 3 full time people for three years.

This might seem acceptable to those who do not create wealth , and who know no better.

It is little different to the largess of the NHS when attempting to create a computerised data system, or the Employment agency attempting to set up the Job seekers data base; the Tax Credits computer system, the teething trouble that the Inland Revenue online declaration system suffered or the hiatius the DVLA had with their systems. ( both of which now do appear to work.)

The point has to be made that the VS website could so easily have been composed at a fraction of the cost. Those that authorise such expenditure seem to be under the misapprehension that value for money is repreneted by the row of noughts after the first figure. Not so.

In our locality we could point to half a dozen professional webdesigners who would have done a better job at a fraction of the price.

2

Airds,

Castle Douglas 28/10/2007 16:41:33

#1 I couldn't agree more. The tragedy is that in terms of the performance of our National tourism website www.visitscotland.com, we are lagging further & further behind our competitors. A notable weakness is the almost total lack of map-based information on the site that means tourists don't have a clue about where places and events are in Scotland. Earlier versions of the website did have scaleable maps even if they weren't cutting edge, but now there is nothing of value. Compared with destinations like www.newzealand.com/travel or even www.yellowstonepark.com our own national site is nothing less than a disgrace. Pumping money into tricks to try to fool Google into thinking that the website merits better position is a waste of scarce resources. The real answer of course as many accommodation providers already know, is to take the website back into public ownership and task VisitScotland with a remit to run it properly, as they should have done in the first instance, to promote Scotland instead of selling accommodation. See the campaign website www.reclaimvs.com for more information.

3

JMC,

SW Scotland 28/10/2007 17:33:34

Hear! hear! Will Visit Scotland please hear us?

4

Angus,

Balloch 28/10/2007 19:30:18

The site should be scrapped.

What other trade organisation gets £300k from the taxpayer to advertise their businesses on a website?

If the tourist trade wants a website they should pay for it themselves.


 

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