My topic:

My hometown is Salalah in Oman. Every time I go there on Al-khareef (monsoon) season I discover a lot of things that make Salalah the heaven of the Arabian Peninsula. Al-khareef starts from June to August refreshing tourism in Oman, the temperature goes down to 18 on the green mountains and 20 in the rest of Salalah, not to mention the mizzling almost for all day. The nature then is stunning; the land is covered with a beautiful green rug and there are some waterfalls on some hills. Advertising for Salalah have started from more than five years ago through TV, radios, newspapers, travel agencies…etc. Lately, the Internet has participated in advertising Salalah, but clearly not well enough. I have selected six sites that talks about Salalah and evaluated them using a criteria I have adapted from Lesley University website.

The sites i have evaluated :

Sue Hutton's personal site
www.geocities.com/Baja/Canyon/3778/spunkysm.jpg
Rating=88 (the only problem is the currency of the content )

This site covers my topic completly. It's language is readable for everyone and the layout and links organization makes it easy to navigate through this site. The author is specializedand capable to speak about this topic.

this site includes:

1. OMAN, every thing a tourist needs to know, hotels, maps, visas, snapshots...and alot more
2. THAILAND, CYPRUS, EGYPT ( the nature and culture ), but he mainly consentrates on Oman maybe because he lived there for nine years.
3. MUSIC, POETRY. sue here shows his favourite poems and songs.
4. FAMILY, a little about his family, including pictures.
5. links to another site of Sue talking about many historical women.
6. RESUME, his online CV
7. CONTACT ME link

Al-Khareef Festival 2001
Dhofar Municipality, Oman
www.khareefsal.om
Rating=72 (doesn't use a standard browser and doesn't cover my topic perfectly)

This is a well-designed site and provides free information that helps a tourist. It has three main defecitves; out-of-date, uses macromedia flash as the browser (not standard) and most importantly the link that switches to the english version of the site is written in arabic, meaning that a non-arab visitor won't be able to locate this link.

1st personal site
Khalid Fadhel, student at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/alaska/603/11.htm
Rating=64(needs more graphics)

It is obvious that the author has done a lot of effort in creating this site. It is very rich of valuable information about Salalah. Two main problems gave it this score; it is out-of-date and very poor of pictures. Most of the pages about Salalah does not contain any pictures except the gallery page. The language,although the authour is Omani, is a little hard, but it still a good piece of work.

3rd personl site
Golden Horizons American consulting company that promotes commercial relations between Oman and America
www.tecsolv.com/golden-horizons/index.hrml
Rating=60( not very relevant)

It is a good site that promotes for Salalah and provides a lot of information about it supported with graphics. The problem that it doesn't cover my topic very well. But it still a usable site.

Oman Information center
go to the page Rating=56(no contact us link)

This site is a business site that promotes for Oman. It is not updated and I couldn't find the author. Besides, there no sufficient information about my topic here and the langauge was very difficult for me.

2nd personal site
go to the site
Rating=36(don't quit your day job)

THis site is very poor of information. Many spelling mistakes, low level of English, out-of-date and many other defectives. The map that is suposed to be for Salalah is very confusing and points to many spots on the middle east. The author is anonymous and the is unusable.

Conclusion:

Only three pages out of the six pages I found were usable and the best one that scored the highest was a personal page of a geologist called Sue Hutton who is a specialist and lived nine years in Oman which makes him very authorized to talk about my topic. The site is relevant to my topic and has an easy language and it is quiet easy to navigate through this site. It deserves completely to be at the top of my list.

links: You can find my Word document that contains the result table. click here