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CUMBRIA TOURIST BOARD MEMBERS' BULLETIN, September, 1997 Cumbria The Lake District 'Cumbria The Lake District' - the Official Cumbria Tourist Board Web site - is already receiving approximately 5,000 page accesses a week. Featuring about 100 members, it has fast become the leading internet resource for the County. To date it has generated 300 requests for the 'Holidays 97' guide from no less than 25 different countries, with the three most popular sources coming from the UK (54.7%), USA (19.8%) and Canada (4.5%). Brochures have also been sent as far afield as Argentina, United Arab Emirates, Taiwan and the Philippines.Numerous positive comments on the site have been received from internet users, and a selection of these is provided below: "It brings together many interesting areas for me to explore, and will be useful in planning my next trip to the UK." A.W., U.S.A. "I have had a look at the site, it is great... keep up the good work." Wigan County Council "It's wonderful... access is instantaneous - unlike prior sites which either waited to respond or didn't respond at all." J.P., New York "Had a look and I must say it is grand! I am definitely going!" M.G., Canada "The site provides useful information becuase it addresses specific questions a tourist would ask. This is done within a visually pleasing and informative format." D.B., Canada "Reviewed the site, absolutely fantastic, great watercolours used as images, it brings back great memories of the Lake District, having lived there for 24 years, now living in Ontario, Canada. We will be back in the Furness area for 10 days on a vacation." S.I., Canada "...it is well done. Makes me want to return to that beautiful part of Britain." T.M., Washington, U.S.A. The promotion of the Cumbria Tourist Board site is of great importance. A popular means of finding any Web site is through the use of search engines which rate Web sites according to the keywords that interest the user. The Cumbria Tourist Board site is registered with all of the key search engines. Being listed on the first page of results from a given search, however, is extremely competitive as there are many thousands of Web pages with reference to Cumbria. Despite this, Cumbria Tourist Board's Web site performs exceptionally well with Excite, Metacrawler and Webcrawler where it dominates the first page of search results whether the user is searching for 'Lake District' or 'Cumbria', and it is hoped that similar results can be achieved with other engines. This process takes time, however, as each search engine operates in different ways, and it can take anything up to eight weeks to see the results of a re-registration. The site will be promoted in numerous other ways - links have been requested from related Web sites and the URL - or internet address will feature on Cumbria Tourist Board literature. Also, the new British Tourist Authority site and several regional tourist board sites link directly to that of Cumbria Tourist Board. Any member not yet on the Official Cumbria Tourist Board site but wishing to have a presence on it should contact Tanya at Cumbria Tourist Board. Dr. Paul H. Johnson, The Dedicated Partnership Official Web site designer of the CTB site
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