Sunday ramble mainly reflections on another aspect of TDCIT and leisure promotion

Work has started on the Cervia to make her safe for visitors to go onboard, which is most encouraging.

My main Ramsgate objectives this year, to get the Pleasurama site cleared for leisure use, to get a foot passenger service to the continent, to get the maritime museum and Cervia open, is all a bit of an uphill struggle.

It looks as though Euroferries may be in difficulties, which is worrying, as Ramsgate would benefit considerably from a foot passenger service from the continent with the exchange rate as it is.

I do a lot of writing to council and councillors but frankly it is often hard to tell if it makes much difference so I was pleased on Friday, during my struggle to get Thanet Pride onto the councils website, to be told by the TDC officer in charge of council communications that the officers in that department appreciated what I have been doing and found it helpful.

In the course of the Thanet Pride business I discovered that the council have another website http://www.visitthanet.co.uk/ this is run for them by http://www.newvisiongroup.co.uk/ and frankly could do with considerable improvement.

As they host the publicity videos on Youtube one can see from the small amount of viewings they get that the site isn’t very effective; Margate - 272 views, Broadstairs - 232 views, Ramsgate - 553 views, Thanet - 316 views.



All the videos were uploaded 6 months ago during which time most people would have been looking for leisure events for the summer.

The same company produces the website for the Yorkshire Moors their publicity video has had 8,254 views.

So one question here is what does it cost to have four vidios professionaly made for such a small number of veiwings.

The visit Thanet website has many flaws one comes to associate with TDCIT the search box on the home page doesn’t work properly for starters.

Very little use is made of modern IT resources, there are no feeds for examle.

With the events, the large events have no priority over small ones and major events are not promoted on their homepage.

To put this into perspective this video I put up a year ago has had 3,322 views, the main reason it has been viewed so much is that I have used it before on this blog.



Now the four Thanet publicity videos have picture link on the visit Thanet website homepage which makes me suspicious that no one much uses the site.


I have just noticed that the counter on this blog has just passed the 100,000 mark so a thank you to my readers for putting up with my ramblings.

I will endeavour to add to this as the day progresses.