Heuristically Evaluating Greek e‑Tourism and e‑Museum Websites

Abstract

The Internet and its World Wide Web service have reshaped the promotion of cultural and tourism products. Well designed and user adaptable e‑commerce websites improve business promotion as they attract more e‑visitors. Multilingualism, dynamic and thus frequently updated content, email communication and searching capabilities are crucial options of websites. In this paper we empirically build an evaluation methodology to assess the technologies and services of Greek e‑tourism and e‑cultural websites. The primary focus of our work is to evaluate the technical capability of tourism and cultural websites and to realize the available options offered to users. A number of tourism e‑commerce websites and e‑museums were randomly selected and their content and technologies were analyzed based on the methodology proposed. The results of this statistical examination are analyzed and discussed. The main conclusion is that although the reviewed websites are rich in multimedia content they need to support customers more efficiently by offering more services or by refining the offered e‑services.