February 23, 2007
Italian Portal
Not a tech post, but an interesting web related tech story. After two years of work and 45 million Euros (almost 60 million USD) spent, Italy has launched a national portal for tourism, italy.it (links goes part the introduction). The idea is good, as we are one of the most relevant tourist countries in the world. Execution, well, you can see for yourself.
There has been a huge debate because of the amount of (public) money invested. The result is very nice, graphically. Lots of flash, videos, audios, high-quality pictures. But, accessibility is very limited (against our own laws!). It takes forever to see a single page. URLs are very complex. Information is way limited (OK, it just launched, more will come...). For now, I see it as a failure. But if you are interested in exploring Italy and have a lot of petiance, give it a go. By the way I really like the "country" logo:
4 Comments
Italian Portal
Saluti from Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, Marco. Well, I've certainly seen worse; it's not too bad (but slow, even from right here in Italy). Honestly, when I see any serious initiative being taken in Italy on the web, I applaud it, even if the execution is not always perfect, only because Italian businesses on the whole lag so far behind in exploiting the web to best advantage. That's a sweeping statement, of course, and there are definitely some good sites, but generally, I've found that company sites provide virtually no information compared to the equivalents in other countries; it's often as if the developers/planners simply don't understand the potential. We end up doing almost all of our internet research for products & services using UK or German sites, and then have to manually look for local companies that deliver something similar here (using the yellow pages!). It's definitely getting better, though.Comment by Kai Griffin [http://www.griffinbyteworks.com] on February 23, 17:46
Italian Portal
And I could drive faster from Austria to Italy ;) Wonder who used up all that money. Certainly not the programmers...Comment by Fritz on February 23, 18:52
Italian Portal
Funny--I just tried to access the site via the link provided, but just get the message "Error 503: Failed to load target servlet [portal]." Accessing http://italia.it/ directly results in the same error.Comment by Dropout on March 8, 15:10
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Italian Portal
Comment by Curious on February 23, 16:03