Visit Liverpool

www.VisitLiverpool.com promotes the city of Liverpool to both domestic and international tourists, as well as to business travellers, the meetings incentive and conference market and to the travel trade. As a premier city destination Liverpool competes with other European tourist cities like Manchester, Barcelona and Budapest, for weekend breaks as well as sporting and event based business.

Kate Blagrove, New Media Development Manager of The Mersey Partnership is responsible for the Visit Liverpool web site, she welcomed the opportunity to benchmark performance against other destinations as part of a wider project to evaluate destination websites in England’s North West.

“We were aware that, while the site still did the job that we required of it, we needed to do some work on it to optimise the site and its content for Liverpool’s 800th birthday year in 2007 and our European Capital of Culture status in 2008” says Kate “the opportunity to audit the site, benchmark it against other destinations and assess its content against our strategic objectives was invaluable in developing a focussed brief for the necessary website development”

The Visit Liverpool website performed well in terms of its infrastructure, meeting accessibility and usability criteria established for Tourism sites in the UK and that facilitate search engine crawlers. Areas earmarked for improvement include:

• Improving website content to better meet the needs of clients and fulfil the main objective of the site, which is to promote booking of accommodation and other services in Liverpool
• To optimise the text and meta data of the site for commonly used search phrases so that it performs better on search engines
• To make clearer the official status of the site as the tourism organisation for the city Liverpool

Carrying out a strategic evaluation using the Destination Web Watch Website Audit, Content and services evaluation and on site questionnaire, gave The Mersey Partnership a head start when briefing the developers of their new Visit Liverpool site, and they intend to audit the new site as soon as it is complete.

Kate adds:

“The World Tourism Organization Destination Web Watch enables us to benchmark our website, which we have never done before; the new site will carry many more advanced features like mapping and other improved functionality.
The city break market is very competitive so we shall review the site again at least every couple of years to make sure that we are maintaining a good competitive position.”