Incredible India website wins PC World Award

New Delhi, Jun 19 (UNI) Adding a new feather to its cap, the Tourism Ministry's website -- www.incredibleindia.org -- has bagged this year's PC World Web Award in the tourism category for best design.

The aim of the Web award, instituted by PC World, is to create a benchmark for the dotcom domain, thereby bringing to the fore a wide range of websites offering useful services that readers can use.

The websites were evaluated using parameters like content, structure and technology to arrive at the winners. The list was filtered on the basis of preliminary evaluation of the sites by a 14-member jury comprising domain experts in the field of design, security and technology.

Earlier, the Tourism Ministry's website was awarded the 'Golden Palm' award at the 10th National Conference on E-governance for being the ''Best Government Website'' by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances and the Department of Information Technology in 2007.

The Ministry has been utilising the Internet media to promote the ''Incredible India'' campaign both in India and abroad.

The objective of the campaign is to build an awareness about the richness of India and position the country India as a favoured tourist destination for foreign and domestic tourists.

To give a 360 degree approach to the publicity efforts, the campaign theme on the Internet has revolved round capturing the theme 'Colours of India'.

There are about 100.1 million websites operating in the World Wide Web (WWW) as in March this year and the Tourism Ministry's website was ranked 25,000 in April, a ministry official said, terming it as ''a significant achievement.'' The site, initially commissioned in English, was later translated into Hindi, French and Japanese. In April this year, the Chinese version of the site went live. Tourism Secretary S Banerjee launched the Korean language site of Incredible India -- www.incredibleindia.co.kr -- on June 16.

The official said there had been a significant increase in the traffic to the website www.incredibleindia.org with average hits of 10 lakh a day.

Considering the importance of the Social Media Optimisation (SMO), the ministry has adopted this medium to promote itself. The films on You Tube continue to be a big draw. The 30-second TV commercials on 'Chasing the Monsoon' attracted over 2000 hits in two weeks.

UNI SKS MP KN1836