Marco Tech Blog

February 23, 2007

Italian Portal

Italy just launched a national web portal, italia.it. A lot of money for a nice-looking, graphic-intensive, but sloppy site. Probably an interesting case study... of (partial) a failure.

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:

posted by marcocantu @ 2:58PM | 4 Comments [0 Pending]

4 Comments

Italian Portal

Ok, it's launch day, but I could fly from the UK to 
Italy quicker than the site loads !

Comment by Curious on February 23, 16:03

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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