A good friend and colleague of mine (Mo from TravelOregon.com) in the Travel and Tourism industry notified me about the new VisitFlorida.com website today. Having worked on the TravelOregon.com website myself as well as a number of other travel-related websites, I have to say I’m pretty floored by the VisitFlorida folks for their extreme “web 2.0″ approach to their new site, even if I don’t personally agree it makes for the best user experience.

Mo wrote a post about it on his travel blog…you can read it here. As Mo pointed out, the biggest difference of this site is the “web 2.0 inspired” approach, especially their navigation (which is based on tag clouds). Here’s a screenshot of the main navigation:

This is most interesting to me is that they do not “prescribe” a navigation path for users by determining the site’s architecture and navigation. Rather they rely on what they term as “editor’s picks” (content chosen by VisitFlorida) and what users search for on the website. And although there is general industry concern about the usability of tag clouds with consumers, the folks at VisitFlorida found through user testing that with some label changes and a very effective search interface, they actually respond very well to it.

The site features all of the things that a Web/Travel 2.0 site should have:

• User-submitted photos and videos
• User-submitted trips
• User Reviews
• 10 “Florida Experts” who are contributing content regularly for the website
• Content tagging

Its the content tagging that powers the site search, and ultimately the tag cloud as well. I absolutely love how outright they have been with their use of Web 2.0-based content and tools.

The downside of this site though is the lack of good editorial content and rich imagery. Its almost as though the site relies far too much on user-generated content, and not enough on solid editorial or factual content. Nonetheless, way to go Florida for being daring enough to do this.

Don’t forget to read Mo’s interview with Florida’s CA Clark and his thoughts on the site too.
http://traveltrendreport.blogspot.com/2007/12/case-study-conversation-with.html