Thursday, August 4, 2011

Our new website is coming in December!

More Journalists
We’ll have a bunch of new islands for you to digest. The Cayman Islands, written by dive specialist Tim Ecott, and Montserrat, St Martin/Maarten, Saba and St Eustatius written by top food writer, Nigel Tisdall. Jane Anderson is exploring art through the Caribbean, while Peter Ellegard has joined us as our golf correspondent. Sara Macefield has been subbing vast swathes of our top level copy, written about Sailing and Regattas, Culture and Heritage, Food and Drink as well as Cruising in the Caribbean and a host of other new features. Emily Ashwell is looking to become our “News Guru” with Sara - covering all the major hot topics as they arise. Tess Hokin has updated our Anguilla Guide and will be submitting news and reviews about the island as well as stories from St Martin/Maarten.

More Topics with Better Navigation
As our journalists cover more topics, igniting news stories and giving added interest to each destination, so our website will grow – from having fewer than 500 pages to more than 1200! It will also be much easier to navigate around the site…our user testing showed us that our visitors wanted to search by image, by product and by map, so we’re giving them what they want – making our navigation much more intuitive.

Full Directory Listings
We are adding a Directory Listing, so that the site goes from featuring the best of the best in each business category to listing all businesses that cater to tourism on every island. This will be the first directory of its kind, in the Caribbean! However, our journalists will still make their own recommendations of who is doing the best job – it should be interesting to see who gets featured!

Social Media and User Review Integration
Once you’ve seen what we have to say, perhaps you’d like to discuss it or tell your friends? We will be integrating the usual social media tools so that our users can share their research, comment on our reviews and list their favourite places - perhaps recommending a few places that we haven’t managed to get to!

Booking Facilities
And whilst we still don’t count ourselves as a booking engine, rather a guide to the region, we are pleased to say that we are improving our booking facilities so that users can more easily book directly with a product or company, contact a tour operator or down the line make arrangements using a carefully selected booking engine.

We hope you enjoy the new site when it goes live and we welcome any feedback…

Happy Travels!

www.definitivecaribbean.com
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