Dear Source:
In response to Tom Yaegel of the web site VisitStCroix.com: I agree it is a big mistake for the government not to have the URL of the U.S.Virgin Islands on every Tourism Department advertisement. Tourism really does need a site desperately. Even a few pages with a current events calendar would be better than nothing. A web address will increase the department's ability to advertise, because Tourism can put the meat of the information on the web site and the teaser in print or television or whatever, which could mean spending less money for the traditional advertising.
Sure, you can spend $1.5 million on a web site, but the territory cannot afford that! I mean let's get real here. The Virgin Islands needs to save money and make money right now, not spend it unnecessarily. I have seen plenty of well-funded web sites that weren't worth it and were just a waste of money and a boon to the web designers. And I've also seen plenty of low-budget web sites that turned out fabulous and make lots of money for the owners. The latter is what the V.I. needs right now.
Mr. Yaegel reports a large volume of hits to his site. This in the past has been a common way for webmasters to artificially inflate the appearance of how many visitors go to a web site. Mr. Yaegel would be advised to use either unique visitor statistics (how many IP addresses were actually logged) or unique page views (how many pages were actually viewed). "Hits" refers to how many files were downloaded, with each page of a site having many files – in his case about 56 or so per page! So if I just look at one of his pages, he will record that as 56 hits instead of one page view or one visitor.
To view how many files are on a page, you can go into Netscape and just click on the upper menu and View>Page info to see how many files each page contains. Duplicate images will not be counted more than once.
I live on St. Thomas and have been a web developer here for over five years. Our company, Webmasters.vi, was started in November 1999. Before that I did web design for Cobex and was the manager of the web department there. I also own many regional web sites in Colorado, such as MileHighCity.com and Pagosa.com. Our regional site, Here.vi, includes all of the Virgin Islands.
Mr. Yaegel may not have received a response from Tourism to his offer to design a web site because officials want a more viewer-friendly page, something like www.Here.vi. No offense to Mr. Yaegel, but his site is more geared toward selling and advertising than informing the users about the islands. The 60 customers he mentions is a large number, but being able to sell advertising should not be what the Tourism Department is interested in. It needs a good, low-cost, user-friendly web design. I really hope the officials hire their web design company based on the work it does and not on how many "hits" or advertisers its existing site has.
Also, because the site will probably receive lots of visitors, Tourism needs a company with a good knowlege of the hardware end of things. What kind of server is best? How fast will the site be when 500 people are all viewing it at the same time? Speed is the most important thing in web-site functionality. Costly, slow features are not what Tourism needs. And what if there is a hurricane? Will the site go down? What will it take to get it up again?
Cindy Larason
St. Thomas
