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TopSite Winner: Yukon Winter
| Review: Yukon Winter |
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| Site: | YukonWinter.Com | |
| Home-base: | The Yukon | |
| URL: | http://www.yukonwinter.com |
Imagine for a moment a bitterly cold destination, with winters where temperatures can drop as low as -52 degrees C, and there can be as little as 4 hours of daylight in a day.
Now imagine that after seeing the website for this place, you couldn't help but want to vacation there. Because that is exactly what happened when our reviewer looked at the Yukon Winter website.
The Yukon Winter site has been carefully crafted to attract tourism dollars to the Yukon. The site is captivating, with its wonderful design, carefully thought out content, and most appropriate dashes of humour that play upon the fact that it gets cold during the winter in the Yukon. Damned cold.
From the first entry point into this website, Yukon Winter is easy to navigate. Frames facilitate movement throughout the site, keeping the main navigation menu present at all times. The design is clean and compelling, artistically presented and yet not slow to load.
The site's content targets potential tourists with information on events and activities such as mushing, snowmobiling and the northern lights; audio files of dogs singing in their yards; outdoor survival tips, and links to current weather reports.
Marketing starts at the entrance to the site, where a pop-up box invites visitors to subscribe to an electronic newsletter. All the information needed to plan a trip is covered, and external links open in a new window, making it easy for visitors to the site to return after following an external branch from the site.
The fact that the electronic newsletter required that I enter my first and last name in order to subscribe was somewhat intrusive, and the survey that was included in the subscription process was long and would have been better as an optional part of the subscription process. These factors will probably cause a number of Internet users to not subscribe when faced with releasing this personal information. However, a nice touch from having subscribers fill in their name is that the thank you screen is then personalized to the individual subscriber.
The other main weakness os the Yukon Winter site was the limited use of meta tags. Even with frames it is possible to optimize a website for the search engines, which in turn extends the marketing reach of the site. Complex meta tagging could really help the site out in search engines when people look for phrases like 'mushing' 'dog sledding' and 'northern lights'. However, a check in several major search engines showed that this site was not yet registered, representing one area where the creators of Yukon Winter can still significantly improve their website.
All in all, Yukon Winter is an excellent business website that effectively markets travel to the Yukon.
-- CO
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