The Beginnings of the Deliverable

Since our last blog post we have received and implemented the desired site map from our collaborators. Additionally, we have developed an extensive work schedule to ensure that the website is developed in a timely manner. The features that need to wait until the domain is attached have been identified. Currently google analytics and a professional email are the items that fall under that category. An event display has also been developed that will allow members to add event information that will then display on the website. We have conducted extensive research on editing permissions to ensure we develop the best way for members of the ecotourism network to add information to the website while allowing the destination management team to ensure that all information is in keeping with the initiative's principals. Starting tomorrow we will begin adding all of the proper information content to the website. Additionally we have begun outlining the results and analysis chapter of our final paper. In conclusion our project has advanced a lot in these past three day and will continue to do so over the next two weeks.

Gearing Up for the Website

As of yesterday, we have completed our interviews and surveys. As we’ve classified responses according to need and feature request, we’ve noticed some interesting things. While we expected people to be eager to be able to have customers book directly from the destination website, quite a few people expressed that this wasn’t interesting or feasible for them. Many of the local business owners we spoke to were actually not set up to do online payments yet, and instead had customers pay in-person or via invoices. Others already had many platforms they had to keep information up-to-date on, and keep track of bookings from - popular websites like Hotels.com - and as a result, they weren’t interested in expanding to yet another website to maintain. With this in mind, we have decided that this is not something we will try to implement, and while we will try to provide our collaborator with some information about setting up booking platforms for future consideration, we will try to spend our time focusing on things that were far more important to all of the people we spoke to. One thing that almost everyone we spoke to agreed on is that an important element of the website is some way to view events in the region. We are planning to first try implementing this as a calendar, and after a usability assessment we are open to the possibility of changing this to a sortable list, depending on what will work best for users and what is possible. Many people also expressed that they really like the video that is currently on the website homepage. We’ve already obtained the video used to make sure that it’s included somewhere on the new website. Based on all of the feedback from our interviews and surveys, and our research into website best practices, we’ve developed the following prioritized list of requirements for the new destination website:

1. Must have a consistent graphical presentation

2. Must rely primarily on images rather than text

3. Site analytics

4. Search Engine Optimization

5. Must have multilingual support

6. Events/Calendar

7. Must have a map

8. Should have a descriptive title

9. Should not have more than “two scroll bars” for pages with important information (in particular, homepage)

10. Should have accurate and at least general information about accommodations, local businesses, eating, and trails

11. Membership

12. Newsletter

13. Blog

14. Should have sitemap

15. Social media links

16. Contact form

17. Organizational emails

18. Product listing

While we won’t implement all of these in this order, due to practicality, we will ensure that the items at the top of the list are implemented and effective before our project ends. We have already run into a few bumps in the road as we’ve begun to design the website: we’ve found that while we can connect different domains using Wix, they can’t go to different languages as the current website has done, and we have also found that we can only use one menu bar in Wix instead of having multiple, preventing us from having different “homepages” for the different categories of user (tourist, professional, local). These will just change our plans slightly, however, and since we discovered them early on we’ll be able to address them easily. We’re looking forward to the weeks ahead of finally being able to ramp up the development of the website, and we hope that the time we spent over the past week discovering the opinions of some of the users of this website will contribute to a final product that fully meets everyone’s needs.

Meeting the People of the Transylvanian Highlands

Over the past three days, we’ve conducted 11 interviews, and even had a few responses to our survey. We’ve been incredibly grateful for all the people willing to spend some time to talk to us, given the worldwide crisis surrounding COVID-19, and their willingness to try using Zoom, a virtual meeting app, as for many of them it’s been their first time. We’ve spoken to both members of the ecotourism board in the Transylvanian Highlands and people involved with businesses across the region, and they’ve given us a diverse set of opinions to guide our development of the website. Many of them have been very enthusiastic about the project, which has been encouraging, though we have also faced some doubts of the feasibility of some of our ideas. While we could take this as a challenge to beat, or as discouragement, we hope to take all of the advice and insight we’ve been receiving to heart and try to use it to make sure that this website is successful in our goal of serving the entire community as well as we can. Most of our interviewees have been very candid about the needs of the region, and their businesses, giving us a useful perspective of how the website needs to function to interact appropriately with this region. Tomorrow we will conclude the remainder of our interviews, and we intend to rapidly analyze the responses to generate a prioritized list of requirements by Friday. We also intend to revisit the responses that we have recorded throughout the project to make sure that we address concerns and insights that our interviewees have shared with us. While we’re disappointed that we can’t go to Romania ourselves as planned, speaking to all of these people has made us feel more personally invested in the project, and has reignited our passion to ensure that we do it right. We’re very thankful for all of these people’s help, and we want to make sure that in return, we include their views, beliefs and needs.

In addition to these interviews, we’ve continued working on our report. We have been working on another round of editing, with each of us reading through for clarity, information content, and grammar and suggesting and making changes. We also recognized a gap in our research on wayfinding and website best practices, so following some additional reading last week we have added new writing on these subjects. As we continue working on the project, we anticipate identifying more gaps in our paper and we have scheduled time to be able to fill these to make sure that the report is a good representation of our project and its quality. We hope that it will inspire readers to become more involved in initiatives such as the one we’re working with in the Transylvanian Highlands, and provide them with a better understanding of the ways and needs of rural areas.