Tempe Toursim Office's Official Website

Dive into Tempe!

Are you bored of sitting in your dorm all day? Get out and explore what Tempe, Arizona has to offer by logging onto Tempe Tourism Office’s Official website today! This city is full of history, culture, news, and daily events that are just waiting for you to step out and join the experience.  The Tempe Tourism Office has created a website to help anyone enjoy Tempe, whether you’ve lived here all your life, you’ve just moved in, or you’re passing through town and wondering what there is to do. Anyone can check up on daily events on the websites homepage, which is sure to give you fun ideas to explore with family and friends. While a couple of bugs interrupt the website’s flow, it’s intuitive design, wealth of information, and modern internet integration make tempetourism.com a useful resource for ASU students and visitors of this lively desert city.

As you begin to navigate the website, its sensible design brings visual appeal and creates a welcoming usability. The aqua, yellow and orange layout is professional and consistent, while complementing a slideshow of high-resolution photography from Tempe’s cityscape on the home page. Cascading behind all of the tabs are playful etches of sunshine and nautical motifs that lessen the impact of strong colors and help to emphasize the text. These eye-pleasing elements invoke a vibrant, inviting mood that makes the many useful tabs feel more click-able. While this tourism database is visually appealing, it is designed in a way that doesn’t confuse you or cloud the important information. You can find the site’s main functions at the top of the screen, where a silver bar shows links for Things to Do, Events and News, and a custom Trip Planner. Further left is a column for secondary, more specified tabs such as Sports Events Planner and Travelers with Disabilities that cater to guests with more specific queries.  Being able to see all of these search options from the home page gives you an opportunity to save time, and ultimately makes Tempe Tourism’s page more user-friendly and intuitive. Another key feature is the integration of other Internet resources into the design. Web 2.0 has cultivated an entirely different online landscape in the past few years, with applications from phones, social networking sites, and viral trends bringing us together behind computer screens like never before. Tempetourism.com is about stimulating local culture, but by reaching out to these new kinds of Internet users, the site can deliver a more effective, farther-reaching resource. For example, to the right of the centerpiece slideshow is sits a compact website search engine that lets you make speedy keyword scans for the entire site just as you would use Google or Bing to search the web. Below the search bar are 9 thumbnail links for other networking applications that Tempe Tourism uses to publish information, including Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Blogspot, and Pintrest. The page design effectively uses the interconnectivity of our modern web, but keeps your focus on the Tempe Tourism content. It takes precedence by lining the layout with visible, yet unobtrusive external resources. The cohesive design and numerous features of this website allow it the potential to open doors for Tempe’s residents and visitors alike.  
             After appreciating the initial layout, you might be surprised at the sheer amount of information Tempe Tourism’s webpage contains and shares with its users. While you might expect a tourism website to give you the address of an office, a few phone numbers, and some sparse outlined information, Tempetourism.com goes in depth. For example, the tabs discussed. When clicking on the first tab, Get To Know Tempe, you can learn about Tempe’s history and the story behind the city’s foundation. This section also features some detailed facts about Architecture in the Tempe as well as local business listings. For those planning a trip to the area, the next tab, Where To Stay, features an interactive lodging map with the help of Google Maps. Next is the tab on “Dining & Nightlife”, which once again features a Google Map full of all the dining and nightlife Tempe has to offer from the vivacious Mill Avenue to a more quiet, intimate settings. This tab has issues with organization, simply due to the vast amount of food and entertainment establishments in the Tempe area. It could be improved with a more specified filtering system, because searching for something specific would be time-consuming. It is a comprehensive listing, but allowing users to filter searches based on formality or zip code could be more efficient. For athletes there is a tab just for you, dubbed Sports & Recreation. It includes details on everything from popular recreational locations to upcoming events like Ironman Arizona and the Soma Triathlon. If you aren’t quite sure what you want from the city, there is a tab simply titled “Things To Do”. This tab shares information on shopping, attractions, arts & culture, activities for kids, itineraries, statewide attractions, and tours/transportation. This broad part of the site is great for finding new things to do in Tempe when you are out of ideas. Lastly is the Events & News tab, which features a detailed and up-to-date calendar as well as regularly-updated blogs that offer you more personalized opinions about Tempe’s culture. Organized and comprehensive, this website gives plenty of reasons to be interested in the city and all of the great opportunities in it.
            The site gets its point across through a variety of methods that try to capture the user’s interest by deviating from more generic website formats. The Interactive lodging map mentioned earlier shows an aerial map of the Tempe area with icons showing different types of locations. You can search for Hotels (blue sofas), Arts & Culture (theatre masks), Dining (red forks and knives), and several others on this useful application. Following any of these topics to their part of the website will also display a unique presentation of information. Each section has a list of key terms or activities; Sports and Recreation summarizes hiking, golf, and biking, while Attractions includes Papago Park, Big Surf, and the ASU Gammage Theatre. Beneath this is an alphabetical section of businesses and locations that offer you fun options, pictures, and plenty of information to find what you’re looking for. The Event Calendar search tool is another illustration of the useful and different methods at work here.  You can search specific words, broad categories like “Live Music” or “Sports”, date ranges, or by months to pull up a calendar graphic revealing to you when things are happening in the city. Like the layout and information, a lot of consideration has gone into the way the site’s content is presented to you. These various arrangements get rid of the monotony you would expect from browsing through a tourism webpage, and keeps users more engaged in learning about the city.
            Amidst the thoughtful utility and design, there were a few instances in which the website stumbles. For one, every couple of links you follow causes a repetitive survey bubble to pop up in front of the screen offering the chance to compete for cash or gift cards. While some of us might be interested in sweepstakes opportunities, this survey can (and should) be available to users without needing to reappear every 45 seconds.  The pop-up’s invasive nature acts in stark contrast to the open vibe created by the rest of the website’s user-friendly qualities.  Another quirk about Tempetourism.com is the way its videos are organized. On the home page, for example, a professionally shot informational video focusing on Tempe’s family-oriented activities is reduced and hidden in the lower right-hand corner. It will take some clicking around to locate the rest of the website’s videos, which are nestled 2 links deep in the minimized secondary tabs to the left. Tempe Tourism has apparently invested plenty of work into its media, because these videos are high quality and very informative, but they are missing a huge opportunity by not grouping the clips with the corresponding information throughout the site. Users could easily read all about Tempe’s history, nightlife, and transportation without even knowing about their option to watch videos on the same topics. While this website is up-to-date, usable, and well designed, a more fluid combination of these aspects would give its users’ a better experience.

Picturing a tourism website should conjure up images of single tone pages with drab descriptions, bland imagery, and stock facts, but tempetourism.com ignores this stereotype with every click. The Tempe Arizona Tourism Office is using an integrated approach to adapt to the Digital Age, and it shows in the way this website intrigues, informs, and interacts with you, the user. Every webpage has a straightforward design, functionality, and advanced features with minimal hitches; each of these traits plays off the other to syndicate an easy, expedient Internet experience. Exploring this website has generous rewards for the curious, from native Arizonans to out-of-towners alike who want to experience the rich culture of Tempe, Arizona.

Go explore for yourself: http://www.tempetourism.com/

Written by Andrew Crawford & Shea Mahoney