Zubi Travel

One thought on “Zubi Travel”

1.  1) Look around the home page- what is your initial impression of what you see? The homepage looks inviting, and I enjoyed the color and design, particularly the three clouds at the top with the island beach scenes in them. All of the photographs have vivid color and are very beautiful. The overall composition and balance of photographs and articles is very well done.
    The main article about Amsterdam had a misspelling in the first sentence (“It’s” should be “its”). The third sentence had a wrong homonym (instead of “there” the word used was “their”). The next article about Teotihuacan had a wrong word (“though” instead of “through”). At this point, I noticed more and more incorrect spellings and typographical errors. The pictures of the locations were very nice from the top to the bottom of the page. The left side of the page had small pictures with information about other locations, and I could see wrong placement of commas in most of those summaries. It is easy to understand that this site was dedicated to travel. I wasn’t necessarily sure if I could book at travel ticket from the site, but after looking at all the homepage, it seemed like this is a blog for travel. I also noticed that users were able to subscribe to this blog. That was unfortunate because I believe most native English speakers would notice some, but maybe not all the grammar mistakes, and this took away the credibility of this site.
   2) Think of something you want to find on this website. Now try to find it. Did you find what you
   were looking for? Was anything confusing? Since this was a travel blog, I wasn’t sure what to look for and decided to look for an address and phone number in the contact information. When I went to contact information I did not get a phone number or address. I only got an email address and did notice that the sentence giving the email address was not properly punctuated.There was nothing confusing. 
   3) Are you encouraged to (create a new account, subscribe, sign up for a free trial, etc.)? Can you tell
   us why (or why not)?
   Though the site encourages users to subscribe to the blog, I personally would not. As stated before, I notice too many typographical errors to find this site credible enough for me to want to subscribe. Some websites offer information that is so important or technical that user may not notice poor spelling and improper word usage, but this site has to be well written. I suspect that most of the writing was done by a non- native English speaker and that may be a problem if the web owner wants native English speakers to use this site.
   4) Go to search engine of your choice and find one other company that offers a similar service.
   Compare the two companies. Which on do you prefer? Why? I went to Google to search for another travel blog and quickly found one called The Cheap Route. From the initial look, the second site wasn’t as visually appealing as the first one but it’s nice. Though I didn’t mention it above, I noticed the second site had similar tabs above fold of the homepage, but the second site’s tabs seemed to be more informative than the first site’s. The second site’s first article is from 2012, and the first site was very current. The photographs are not as clear as the first site’s. After reading the small features on the second site’s homepage, I did notice some punctuation mistakes but not as many as on the first site’s page. Also, looking at the left side of the second site, I noticed there were tons more blog entries than the first site to choose from.  I would prefer the second site’s blog because the writer actually experienced the travel, and the first site did not seem like it was from personal experience. I believe I would want to read a travel blog from the perspective of someone who has been to the location rather than a writer giving photographs and second -hand information.
   5) Please share any additional feedback/comments you may have.
   I would say this site has potential. First, because this is a blog, there needs to be better spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I just don’t believe the blog will get the type of “hits” or readership it is looking for with these types of mistakes so prevalent. I would suggest getting someone professional or otherwise, who is a native English speaker, to edit the writing. It seems obvious to me that spell check was used, but that is just not enough when spell check can miss wrong words, missing words, and homonyms. Second, I think there needs to be another way to contact the webmaster or writer. Perhaps a physical address or a phone number would be sufficient. This is just to make users feel more confident about the site and allow users or business owners more than one way to contact the site if needed.  The final suggestion would be to simply continue. As I stated before, the second site had tons of blog entries and as a user, it is very reassuring and encouraging to see a blog that is well established and has plenty of entries to read. It’s a lovely site, very appealing at first sight. With time and a couple of corrections, this could be a very successful travel blog. 

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