The entire web site of the Mossel Bay Tourism isn now available in Afrikaans as the organization revealed. “The internet has become the most important tool that people use when planning their holidays,” said…
The entire web site of the Mossel Bay Tourism isn now available in Afrikaans as the organization revealed. “The internet has become the most important tool that people use when planning their holidays,” said Louis Harris, Mossel Bay Tourism’s marketing director. “And it makes sense that they want to find information in their mother tongue.”
“So, after the successful launch of our new web site late last year, it was imperative that we address the town’s most important source markets — both internationally and here at home. We began with the international sites because we felt that they would take the longest to yield results. South Africa is a long-haul destination for Europeans, and we wanted them to have our material ahead of the bookings season and, more especially, in time for the annual tourism Indaba,” added Mr. Harris.
“The French, German, Dutch and Spanish pages — which represent summaries of the larger, English site (and which are not directly linked to the database of members) — thus went live at the beginning of May. Once those pages were complete, our web masters began work on the Afrikaans site and they are now busy translating the summary pages into Xhosa, too.”
All the sites are accessed from the same portal or web address visitmosselbay.co.za and each is identified by a country flag which appears on every page. “Wherever you are on the site, you can always find your way back to the language of your choice,” said Mr. Harris.
“The Afrikaans site is different to the foreign language sites, though, because it is linked to the database and therefore contains our member’s individual entries and links to their own home pages.”
Mr. Harris explained that members whose entries on the database appear in English will appear in that language on the Afrikaans site, too. “Unfortunately we cannot justify the cost of building and maintaining two databases and we hope that users will understand and make allowances for this,” he said. “We have posted an explanation on each database page in this regard.”
In conclusion, Mr. Harris announced that the site’s Xhosa pages would be live within the next few days. “This will put us in the forefront amongst destination marketing organisations in the Cape Provinces,” he concluded.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
