Tourism Management Websites

In this week’s blog assignment, I was asked to make an observation of my major’s website on our school’s website and compare them to other school’s website of my major. As I stated in previous blogs, I am a tourism management major also known as a Hospitality Management major. This assignment was very interesting because it allowed me to view how other schools sold their tourism management programs, and to gather strengths and weakness of their website for my next project.
Step 1: Finding the Tourism Management’s major websites
The University of Southern Mississippi: http://www.usm.edu/undergraduate/hotel-restaurant-and-tourism-management-bs
Strengths: Some of the strengths that The University of Southern Mississippi has achieved in its website is that is very easy and convient to access the webpage. The Tourism Management website is very informative and straight to the point to what the program will be available to offer.
Weakness: The website is very bland, and is not visually attractive. It is a simple production of a website and lack excitement, especially being a tourism website. I think their needs to be some sort of an attention getter.
Florida International University: http://hospitality.fiu.edu/
Strengths: This is by far the most impressive tourism management website that I came across in my research. The first thing that caught my attention was how well the Department of Hospitality at The Florida International University was the structure of the website. It was very creative and well informative. It had some many choices to choose from, and it wasn’t all on one page like The University of Southern Mississippi’s Hospitality Program. There were many links to alumni, different courses, study abroad, tours of building, and etc. I think that anytime somebody can relate to something through pictures and sources, there is a more interesting feeling that person can receive.
Weakness: None
University of South Carolina: http://www.hrsm.sc.edu/hrtm/
Strengths: This is another example of a perfectly put together website. It has everything that should be presented to the reader about Tourism Management. This website resembles Florida International tourism management websites in providing several source information, pictures, links, and student profiles to broadcast as much of the Hospitality program as possible.
Weakness: After looking at the website some for awhile, I noticed links were running together, and after a view clicks I became very confused of where I was going and where I came from on the website.

University of Houston: http://www.hotcoursesusa.com/us/university-of-houston-72137/all-in-tourism-management-programs.html
Strengths: This was in my opinion the worst website that I viewed during this research. The strengths are hard to introduce without noticing its weaknesses. There were only a few strengths and those were: Easy to find on Google, and easy to connect to. The information was very broad and not as informative as the previous websites.
Weakness: There was not a direct link to the website; I had to search for the Tourism Management department; there was no sense of excitement or effort accumulated into the website.

Step 2: Objectives Checklist
1. What am I writing: What my main purpose in writing a website for my Hospitality major is to sell the Hospitality field to somebody who may be interested in joining the Hospitality field, or to spark an interest in the reader to even change or make their major into the Hospitality Industry.
2. What prompts you to write? The love and excitement that I receive from just being in the Hospitality Industry makes me want to express that excitement and energy to people who are not familiar with it and to be able to establish them with a relationship within the Hospitality field.
3. What outcomes do you desire? I kind of answered them in the question above, but I want to establish a connection with the reader about Hospitality and the excitement that is will provide through incredible opportunities, and more to inform and educate readers of what exactly Hospitality majors do and will do in the future.
4. What outcomes does your reader desire? I would assume their main desire is a more adequate amount of information about a desired topic in the Hospitality industry.

5. Who is your primary reader? Students, Teachers, Professionals, Parents.

6. What is your reader’s relationship to you? Somebody who is looking for knowledge about a certain topic or subject within my major, and I am almost like a stepping stone for them to receive the proper information about Hospitality.

7. What are your reader’s job titles and responsibilities? I assume I wouldn’t know the job titles of somebody who would be looking at my website but as a responsibility of them is if they have any questions or comments about the webpage to contact the establisher of the website and present them with those questions or comments. Also another idea about the job titles, is if professionals in the Hospitality field are looking for employment this could be a responsibility for them to contact the establishment for hiring or interviews.

8. How familiar is the reader with your specialty or subject? This could vary so much, because I could have first time readers about Hospitality looking for more information about the major. Then I could have readers like myself doing research on others schools and companies tourism websites looking for jobs, information, or etc.

9. Does your reader have any communication preferences you should take into account? In being in the Hospitality industry, it basically means a people’s industry and anybody that works in it has to be able to communicate in the best preference of its clients and that includes disabilities, translations, and etc.

10. Should you take into account other things about your reader when writing? I think the main thing to take into account is that the reader knows nothing about my major. I need to be as specific and state everything I can to the reader.

Step 3: The main thing that I learned is to have fun with the website but also be very professional at the same time. If you want to get more out of the cliental that visits the website, then put more into the website. The website needs to be very informative, have plenty of pictures and videos, and easy to conduct research within the website. There should be a clean production of the website and nothing should run onto each other or state any confusion.