Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Santa Fe Convention and Visitors Bureau

http://www.santafe.org
Intended Audience: This website as designed for visitors to New Mexico. The page title Santa Fe Convention and Visitors Bureau conveys that this site is also designed for organizations or businesses considering a location for a convention of some sort.

Usefulness of Content: The purpose of this site is to get people excited about Santa Fe and raise enthusiasm about planning a visit to Santa Fe. The website has extensive content regarding the practicalities of visiting Santa Fe. On the home page is form for making a hotel reservation and a link for directions to the city.

Ease of Navigation: This website is not unusual and the navigation is organized under a large photo banner. Located on the left the navigation's placement should not surprise most internet users. However, the default text size on the site makes the navigation hard to see. There is also plenty of contextual navigation (in line text links) to other areas of the SantaFe.org site. This is helpful for the kind of browsing that most travel planning requires and it supports associative learning. These things are all positive but I did find it difficult to find the phone number for the organization. I think this would be frustrating for users who are more comfortable making travel arrangements on the phone.

Consistency of Design: The design of this website is consistent throughout the subsites connected to SantaFe.org. However, I don't think the design is as good as it could be. The large graphic at the top of the page is good looking and static which makes it more accessible, still in 2007 I don't know if a large banner photo on a website raises the excitement that it once did. The website is largely text based which is fine but I think that the text should be more readable. I was also surprised to see an embedded video on the homepage but this a slim offering to Web2.0 enthusiasts.

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