The Tourism Service Award for May goes to...

New Zealand Showcase

It's good to see a bi-lingual entry, even if our judges don't speak Japanese. This site is aimed at visitors to the southern part of the South Island and features a considerable amount of information. As well as details of visitor activities, transport, accommodation etc. there's information on matters which are less tourism-orientated such as agriculture and education. A clever Java menu provides hierarchical access to the wealth of information. The search engine also works well in quickly locating topics of interest. It would be nice to see more tourism sites using similar web tecnologies. A couple of areas which could be improved are, the events section which listed only about five events for the region and, the site's graphics. It might just be a matter of taste but our judges felt the page backgrounds and headings looked a bit 'loud'. Also, one or two images were a bit fuzzy or pixellated. Understandibly, some image quality must be compromised in order to offer fast download speeds however, in the case of small images, it shouldn't be too difficult to get a reasonable resolution. This site however, is no small undertaking and, its creators must be forgiven for any minor imperfections in what is no doubt a very useable and informative resource for the region.

© 1999 Discover New Zealand Magazine