Destination website is making a big impression (From Basingstoke Gazette)

Destination website is making a big impression

9:06am Thursday 21st January 2010 in

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DESTINATION Basingstoke is hitting the spot in promoting the borough – thanks in part to its website regularly achieving 25,000 page impressions a month.

Now, that very same website is up for an award after being shortlisted as a finalist in two categories of the Hantsweb Awards – the Best Pride of Place website and Best Tourism and Leisure website categories.

Launched in its current form a year ago, by Basingstoke-based design and marketing web agency The Escape, the Destination Basingstoke website has shown steady growth and is now on the first page when Basingstoke is entered on the Google search engine.

It also has close to 1,000 subscribers to its e-newsletters and has promoted more than 500 events in the area.

Destination Basingstoke managing director Felicity Edwards said: “We are delight ed to be selected as finalists out of such a strong field.

“We want the website to be the definitive guide to living, working and doing business in the Basingstoke area.

“We get lots of anecdotal feedback that the web site is hitting the spot, but getting to this stage in the awards is the icing on the cake.

“I hope we can encourage as many of our 6,000 unique visitors a month to vote for us through the awards website at www3.hants.gov.uk/hantswe bawards.htm by clicking on to the public vote hyperlink.”

Since 2002, Hampshire County Council has organ ised the awards to improve the standard of online services, encourage good practice, reward innova tion and raise awareness of the opportunities that the web presents for communities.

The winners of the best websites for the award’s 12 categories will be announced in February.