Website Of The Week – LondonTown.com
Any city guide worth its salt has to be accurate, up-to-date and, above all else, comprehensive. LondonTown.com, the ‘Official Internet Site for London’, represents London Tourist Board’s online attempt to meet all of these prerequisites.
Breaking the guide roughly into ‘Where To Stay’, ‘Museums’, ‘Attractions’, ‘Pubs’, ‘Restaurants’, ‘Events’, ‘Shopping’, ‘Sightseeing’, ‘Entertainment’, ‘Nightclubs’, ‘Transport’, ‘Recreation’, and ‘Cafes, Pubs and Bars’, LondonTown.com tramples over well-worn ground in a relatively upbeat fashion.
Using a fraction of the available screen (perhaps to create the illusory feeling of reading a book) LondonTown.com invites us to circumnavigate our way around London’s “best-loved” sites by ‘neighbourhood’ with a little guide on offer, outlining the nature of each ‘neighbourhood’. The whole use of the term ‘neighbourhood’, plus the fact that we are told central London has over 50 of them with names as memorable as ‘Victoria/Westminster’, ‘Mayfair/Oxford Street’ and ‘Chelsea/Earl’s Court/South Kensington’, suggests LondonTown.com is tailored essentially for the American tourist.
As with the site’s homepage each section of LondonTown relies on a busy mixture of colour and animated advertisements. Little of the editorial carries the authority of Time Out and The Evening Standard’s ‘This is London’. Where the site excels, however, is in the documentation of LTB-affiliated guesthouses, hotels and hostels. Each accommodation entry is functionally described with an attempt made to construct a ratings guide. But the ratings guide is too complicated and lacks the user-friendliness of simple stars or more rudimentary thumbs-up/down. Perhaps the most important factor for many tourists in seeking accommodation, is price. Yet all too often any references to price are pushed into the bottom of pages, obscured and quite often lost amongst the clutter of ads and icons.
LondonTown.com also scores poorly in terms of functionality. Too many links simply fail to work. The most interesting section of the whole site – titled ‘Insider’s Guide’ – which purports to list clubbing, pubs and bars, café culture, cybercafes, restaurants, cinema and ‘The Arts’, is unreachable. The hypertext link does not even flicker when clicked. Similarly, the supposed link to the London Tourist Board Accommodation Booking Service splutters gamely but ultimately dies. (Should someone tell our friends at London Tourist Board of ‘Under Construction’ signs?)
Despite being trumpeted as “the official Internet site for London” LondonTown.com delivers virtually nothing when it comes to non-London Tourist Board affiliated organisations and events. Under the heading of ‘Nightclubs’, for instance, we are given a grand total of 8 venues, all with no mention of door or music policy, admission price or DJs. Instead we are given the address and phone number. This is typical of LondonTown.com on the whole – great on the Houses of Parliament but has absolutely no idea about ‘house’ let alone trip-hop.
It is difficult to imagine the user of LondonTown as being anything other than an English-speaking couple with a disproportionate amount of cameras and checked trousers. One can’t help but feel that all tourists should at the very least have a glance at TimeOut, a Lonely Planet, Rough Guide or a Let’s Go. Each one shows a lot more of London, its people and cultural scope – ‘official’ or otherwise.