Dear Commissioner Jackson,
Congratulations on your formal appointment to the position of Commissioner of Tourism! Based on your credentials, as outlined in a recent St. Thomas Source article, it would appear that Governor Turnbull has made a very good choice.
As a technology consultant with 25 years' experience, I have been closely following the "debate" regarding the badly needed USVI Web site. While I think a vendor like IBM will probably charge 50 percent too much and take 25 percent too long, at least you can be confident that a quality product will eventually result. I applaud your intent to develop a site that measures up to the standards set by the Cayman Islands, Puerto Rico and St. Lucia – in this age of online-everything the territory needs to put its best cyber-face forward. If it doesn't, it can expect to see fewer and fewer tourists selecting USVI as a vacation destination.
My real interest in your appointment, however is not as a technology consultant, but rather as a TOURIST. I beg you, please seek out the ideas, suggestions and opinions of REAL TOURISTS, not Web designers, when you begin to develop your site's content. And please be sensitive to the needs of non-cruisers – those of us who support the hotels and restaurants away from the Havensight Mall area. OK, so St. Thomas has a million jewelry stores, but what about the view from Mountain Top (a good thing), or the traffic congestion along the Charlotte Amalie waterfront (a bad thing)? And a good tourism site should also include information of interest to potential residents. After all, most people who move to the territory visit it first.
Before my wife and I visited St. Thomas last year we were amazed at the amount of information available on the Internet – after we arrived we were equally amazed at how much of that information was outdated or inaccurate. Even www.gov.vi has a page that is unfinished and hasn't been updated since October 21, 1998!
As we plan for our move to the territory next spring, we find that we must rely on sites like the St. Thomas Source, which are maintained on a regular basis. If we need information about a product or service we typically contact an advertiser because we figure if they are paying for an ad, they must still be in business!
We look forward to the unveiling of the "official" USVI Web site. If you are developing a mailing list, please add [email protected] to it.
Best Regards,
Richard J. Archer
www.diseno.com