World66 touts itself as the travel guide you write. The site offers travel information on over 20,000 destinations with close to 80,000 articles written and updated by the community of travelers there. Its mission and vision are revealed by the company’s credo: “We believe that travelers are the best source of travel information.” While such a credo is nice, it by no means differentiates this site from the competition.
Like many others, Wolrd66 is trying to get the world’s travelers to unite and build out a database that rivals all other competitive databases. It seems that the travel industry as a whole is attempting to create a social network or ‘Facebook for every site, in hopes that travelers find a home and add content.
Remembering content is king – and getting others to write it for you – the bomb still. But travel is such a rare occurrence for most consumers — how do you get them to contribute to something that they might only need for once a year? And, what about duplicate content? It can’t be king if someone copy pasted it – which it looks like someone did for Murmansk below.
The landing looks like new elements pasted onto old design
Never the less, World66 strives to be the planets (they use that word multiple times on the site) largest single open content travel guide, where people can write about the places they love – the best hotels to catch, and of course must dine eateries. The “bread and butter” is a pretty well played attempt to have a long-tail effect to your travelers inner planner. Every aspect of their ‘guides’ can be edited directly, a lot like a Wikipedia page (without the approval process). You can change or add information for anything you find.
The World66 UI could use a bit of work, and the website is heavy on words and links. It is a tad bit overwhelming to see lists of countries and cities just thrown at you. There are two different boxes that are titled Top Destinations; however, they have nothing to do with each other — nullifying the purpose of either list.
Drill down once and there is Web 1.0 again.
You catch the drift here – some thought was missing by whoever is augmenting the design. However, the centralized map feature is impressive, and eye catching too. But socially (or at best design wise) there is no noticeable social edge here – networking integration with Facebook or Twitter; nor immediate forward facing sharable features seem present.
Finally, all this data running into Google ads on the bottom of the site, makes me wonder where this site is headed – if anywhere. It certainly does not exude the look and feel of a site that gets almost 90,000 unique visitors a month (according to Compete).
- Pro’s:
- Editable content around the review of each place and city
- Resource heavy data
- Multiple language support
- Con’s:
- Resource heavy data
- No deal integration
- Heavy Google ads placement
Like many of the other travel sites, World66 has seen a down-tick in its site traffic to the tune of 38 percent over the last year. It focuses primarily on what it credo bluntly states: travelers adding their travel information to a community. The editing of that information and hoped continuing updates to the content is World66’s bread and butter. With a largely eastern hemisphere focus, World66 could do a better job of the ‘world’ part of its name. There is definitely potential in this site. There next move is beyond obvious. Incorporate sharing and social networking integration. Do the design update dance and expand.
The Murmansk Russia edit page - how about dupe content?