The nerve of some jerks! I just started working on a community website about my little podunk town. Boy I'm really starting to see how backwards some people are. In talking to people in the community, business owners, chamber of commerce and tourism (joke), I've gotten a good dose of how closed-minded, self-serving, know it all or just don't give a good cahoot bout nothing, snobbish, clickish, these people are. Talk about a cush job, that would be the "director of tourism". No one expects anything from the person who holds that chair down. There's no accountability. I asked the president of the chamber, "what does the director of tourism do to promote tourism in our community". He says, "he attends several invitational golf tournaments, attends trade shows and meets with other departments of tourism to discuss ways of promoting tourism" WOW! In other words....absolutely nothing! I've spent countless hours researching different "Chamber of Commerce Sites". 99% are the same.....BORING. They receive no traffic, have no PR, no backlinks and do a pitiful job of promoting anything. I called a nearby city' "Department of Tourism" today to propose that they may want to add some information on my site about their community in exchange for a link to my site. Now here's the kicker! As soon as I mentioned "website" the lady proceeded to tell me that if I was calling about designing them a website, that they already had a firm that handled their site. And went on to say "I don't want to cut you short, but exactly what is it you want from me"? Boy, I tell you, I wanted to tell her just exactly how crappy that 100% flash site was. NO PR, NO Cache, NO Backlinks,basically does not exist. But I bit my tongue and told her to "Have a Nice Life" Now the chamber in my town is also very rude to me. After they found out I was doing a site on our community, guess what? They decided to hire someone to totally redo their junk site (broken images, links that don't work, 404 errors...on and on. I wanna "Kick Some Butt" and DOMINATE the SE's for anything remotely associated with my community. I would put a link to my site and what I've done so far, but since I'm still just a peon, I don't know if this acceptable. Don't want to get slapped right off the bat! Anyway, I would love some constructive advice, criticism and strategy for success. P.S. These know-it-alls in city and chamber positions get together and say "hey we need a website, lets get someone to build it". So they hire a web designer that builds them a site and says "there it is" The site owners don't have a clue about social networking or getting links into their site. They just wind up paying the site administrator for site maintenance and it just sits there doing nothing. Gets little to no traffic.
put together a kickass website, promote the hell out of it, get some link exchanges going and put those folks in their place. i'd be interested in knowing what town your talking about.
Hey man go further than doing it yourself, Even most little towns have some kind of tourism, or at least motels, restaurants and entertainment stuff. Maybe if you start working in with other local business that are visitor based you can take the job of director of tourism for yourself, behind the scenes, then if your doing a good job you might find it easy to get voted in to office. Then actually make it a position that servers the community but mean while you can absolutely put them to shame. Keep in mind that the retard who answers the phone at the office that does no work, has no idea about website promotion. I hope that your website takes off! Wooba