Genuinely Good Tourism Websites

Sapporo and Fukuoka are rivals?

Thanks guys for your links and thoughts. Feel free to add more good pages to the thread if you come across any!

I don't think for us having a well-done foreign language webpage is that ambitious. Our town has been a tourist destination for 400 years and currently has page in 5 languages, but with a circa 2009 design that isn't smart phone hulemdoly and contents that are generally out of date. I haven't seen a clear correlation between town budget or size and page quality. Large ones seem to be more complex, but not necessarily more sophisticated or appealing. Taking a quick look at the "rival" cities, Fukuoka looks dated and it's got awkward English, but the navigation is easy enough to follow and the contents surprisingly deep (model courses of different lengths by themes, etc!) Sapporo is a lot more visually appealing with a magazine feel and I like that it leads off with winter-specific ideas of things to do. The navigation is slightly less clear ("choose" seems odd as a header) but it's got a lot of depth. I don't see why we couldn't do a simpler version of a site with a feel like this as we have content and photographs. Do you know what backend/CMS for Sapporo?

Regarding making the case for foreign tourism, I put together the tourism stats we had and did some visualizations. No we're not so sophisticated and my coworkers hadn't done it previously. For us domestic (Japanese) tourism peaked in the early 90s and every year has been worse than the previous one. The trend line for overall visits is dismal. The trend for hotel stays is also dismal. The only bright spot is foreign tourism which while is in single digits has been rapidly increasing. With domestic tourism likely to decline with Japan's population in the long run, foreign tourism has to be at the center of our future strategies. If your city is at 20% today, that's actually amazing and I think you can make a very strong case to continue investing in that sector for the future. Especially with the projected boom in tourism leading up to the Olympics, the question isn't whether it will increase in any area but how much it will, and a lot of that depends on how well you promote yourselves vs other regions in Japan. Frankly I think we're going to get killed by competent second-tier places like Ishikawa and Hokkaido, but our loss is your gain.

Anyway, back to the Temples, to try to expand the conversation about what is possible or desirable on a temple web page, I put together a quick survey of other temple sites. No we're not Kiyomizu, but I don't think you have to be to put together a page using some of their ideas, like telling about your temple through stories. If the page is just about the architectural details of the temple with pictures of every 門, I think it loses the point of what a temple even is and why anyone would want to visit this temple, and specifically why now.

Kiyomizu www.kiyomizudera.or.jp/index.html
and the magazine-like Feel Kiyomizu: feel.kiyomizudera.or.jp/read/

+ High quality photography
+ Focus on photos with stories
+ Site made not to express facts but tell stories, interest readers. Make them “feel.”
+ Photo gallery as a tumblr: feel-kiyomizudera.tumblr.com/

- Too much use of flash/movies on feel
- Site navigation confusing. Too much scrolling
- Foreign language site very limited in content

Sensoji
www.senso-ji.jp/

+ Content more similar between Japanese and foreign languages
+ Navigation easy to understand
+ Includes how to pray at a Buddhist temple
+ Interesting history, about people and why the temple was created

- Slightly old design
- Few pictures, no video
- No event information in English

Koyasan Shukubo Association
eng.shukubo.net/

+ Good categories including guides, souvenirs, experiences, events
- Old design

Myoshinji
www.myoshinji.or.jp/english/

+ Includes explanation of Buddhism, including Rinzai Sect
+ Explanation of how to do zazen
+ Embeds google map for access
+ Clear navigation

- Too much text

Rinzai-Obaku Zen
zen.rinnou.net/index.html

+ If we want, can we borrow zen videos or explanations from them?

I really like 成田山新勝寺's English website: www.naritasan.or.jp/english/index.html

+ similar design to Japanese version, and also a pretty layout overall
+ easy to navigate
+ has pretty detailed history of the temple
+ lists yearly events by month
+ detailed map of temple grounds AND google maps AND driving directions
+ English is pretty decent

- English is not native checked, content might be difficult for temple beginners
- not as detailed as Japanese site, which isn't a huge deal, but for example yearly event dates are not listed/updated.