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TopSite Winner: Virtual Saskatchewan
Review: Virtual Saskatchewan
| Site: | Virtual Saskatchewan | |
| Home-base: | Saskatoon, Saskatchewan | |
| URL: | http://www.virtualsk.com |
Virtual Saskatchewan is an attractive, online only, tourism and travel magazine. The site aims to connect visitors with the real people, attractions, and legends of Saskatchewan. Focusing on a niche market, namely "the world wide window on Saskatchewan", the site delivers fresh content that is updated bi-weekly.
What drives the site is content. The stories are interesting, the design is clean and intuitive, and the overall experience for visitors is positive - just what a site with a tourism focus should be. VirtualSK puts community building and connecting with its readers first, from which a connection between the sites's readers and advertisers follows.
"The educated traveller, whether she's from Virginia or Saskatchewan, will have a far more fulfilling experience if she knows something of the people, culture and history of the place she visits," writes David Yanko, co-founder of VirtualSK. "For example, only a third of Saskatchewan is grain fields and only 15 per cent of the population is involved in agriculture. There's much more here than farms. Unfortunately, the TransCanada Highway presents travellers with nothing but."
VirtualSK is supported by advertising, and visitors will see advertising banners and buttons at the top and left side of each page. There is enough advertising to make visitors feel like the site is making money, without frustrating them with the feeling that the site is dominated by ads.
Two brothers, 'newspaper guys', came up with the idea for the site, and then partnered with friends in the new media industry who were capable of producing and maintaining a high-quality online publication.
The team behind VirtualSK have worked hard to promote their site on a small marketing budget. Traditional media has covered and continues to cover the site, and they rely heavily on online marketing. They hand-registered their site with the search engines, and listing with directories is ongoing. They have also received a number of online awards, such as the Canuck Site of the Day award, which they recently received for the second time.
Looking at promotional elements built into the site's code, it appears that meta tags have only been used on the front page of the website. This means that the site is missing out on additional doorways into the site.
How does the site turn up in the search engines? When we checked the site against the keyphrase 'travel saskatchewan' in the major search engines, it was ranked as #13 in Excite and #161 in Alta Vista. However, in Lycos, InfoSeek, Yahoo, and HotBot the site was not listed in the top 200 results.
VirtualSK is a site that meets all of the TopSite criteria - nice design, easy to use, excellent content, and strategic targeting. Behind VirtualSK is the goal of building a sustainable business in an area that didn't exist 4 years ago. This is a great example of what a group of creative entrepreneurs can do on the web.
-- CO
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