Blog 3

    I am a Hospitality and Tourism Management major like I have stated in my previous blogs. I found a link; http://hospitality-1st.com/PressNews/Schools.html, that had a lot of the major universities direct links to the their Hospitality and Tourism Management programs. These are the some of the schools I looked at.

Southern Miss
Http://www.usm.edu/undergraduate/hotel-restaurant-and-tourism-management-bs

Purdue
http://www.cfs.purdue.edu/htm/

College of Charleston
http://sb.cofc.edu/academicdepartments/hospitalitytourism/index.php

Penn State
http://www.hhdev.psu.edu/shm/

South Carolina   
http://www.hrsm.sc.edu/hrtm/

    Each of these schools had good things about their website as well as bad. One of my favorite websites; besides Southern Miss of course, was Purdue University. They had so many neat aspects of their website including providing emails of some of the students actually enrolled in the program under a tab called, “Talk to Current Students.”  Other parts of their website that I liked were the rotating pictures of their students in different situations involved within the major. From first glance Purdue University’s program is a very hands on one. This would interest me immediately. There is also an scrolling news bar with the latest news from the major. This is very good item to have, if it is properly kept up with. If it says the latest news is from January 2011, it will lose the effect of having it. I also like the fact that after clicking undergraduate, you can locate a lost of all the classes that a required for the major. This is something that might be helpful to an interested student.

 

    I really did not like College of Charleston’s website. It did not look like someone had spent very much time. There was not very much color, and it was not at all inviting as a perspective student. It was very box like and did not provide much information on the home screen. It gives a generic definition of the hospitality program and then a few ways to contact people within the major. Unlike Purdue’s website that suggested emailing the students, this had the contact information for the office, and dean. It did not even imply that it was worthwhile emailing them it was just listed. It also did not have an individual header for the Tourism and Hospitality program, it had the same picture from the normal College of Charleston website. 

    I think the three things that are most important to designing a web page for my major would be the course requirements, pictures that show my program is interactive and career opportunities. I am writing to design website that will attract students to come to my school based on the Hospitality and Tourism Department. Hopefully the outcome will be that a student looking to get into the Hospitality field will want to participate in my program based on what they see on the website. My reader will desire a knowledge of the type of things my university does. My primary readers will be perspective students of my major. My readers relationship to me will not be personal, it will be informational. A number of people might read my website. Parents of the students would be the main one. The reader could be anywhere on the spectrum of familiarity with my subject. It can go anywhere from a student that has researched multiple universities or a student who knows nothing about the program.
My reader will probably prefer to have an Internet communication type such as email, in the event that they do not, I would provide a phone number as well as directions to the office for the Tourism department. I should take into account that my reader will be very judgmental of first appearance.

    I believe that because my readers might not all know college terminology or even hospitality terminology, I should take special care to explain exactly what everything is.  A key question that most readers will ask is what careers will Hospitality Management majors go into.  I believe that Southern Miss did an excellent job at this; on the home page it says “Career Interest” and lists some jobs that people often go into after graduation. My readers’ attitude would be one of interest. If they are looking at my web page, they would be wanting to learn about the hospitality program at my university. There are a few constraints. They would be to not have an information overload so that there is too much for a person to decipher.

    What I have learned from step one is that you can tell when someone has not put much effort into a website. I do not want to have the first impression of my website to be one of bad taste.