It ain’t that hard…but it matters

So I’m sitting on the deck drinking coffee on a sweet summer’s morning this week. The kid is down at the river with his friends fly-fishing. It is 50 degrees and the sun is beaming from a blue sky onto a colorful palette of wildflowers. It’s the type of morning any sane person would pay to wake up to.
I’m looking over the entertainment calendar in the paper. It is filled with concerts from top-notch reggae to top-notch classical and opera. There are bike races in the offing, fun runs, rodeos, films, gallery openings, lectures, guided hikes, and children’s programs. It is stacked out here in the summer.
So the initial position of the Crested Butte councilman representing the town on the regional tourism board keeps nagging at me. It may be a little thing but it translates to something irritating.
During Monday’s Crested Butte Town Council meeting, Gunnison-Crested Butte Tourism Association and chamber of commerce representative John Wirsing responded to a question from fellow councilperson Roland Mason with a bit too much indifference. The question was about the TA website. Roland asked if there had been any changes since Crested Butte News columnists John Norton pointed out weeks ago that the landing page started off noting that the Blue Mesa Reservoir was finally ice-free and inspection stations for invasive species would be set up by May 1. The mayor pulled up the site on his iPad and said nothing had changed.
Wirsing responded by explaining that there had been a lot of staff turnover at the TA. He said he doesn’t read the paper much and Norton’s column ever so he wasn’t really aware of the issue. Plus, he told Roland as he looked at the website on his iPad at the meeting, “The pictures on the top are scrolling summer scenes and the events calendar appears up to date. What’s the real issue?”
As I told Wirsing at the Monday meeting…”What’s the issue? It makes us look frickin’ stupid is the issue. People surfing the Internet for vacation information aren’t going any deeper into any website when they start reading about ice and invasive species. They’ll quickly find a website that provides them pertinent information they seek. They’ll go to another website and maybe the website of another place. That’s the issue.” If you look around, it ain’t that hard to find something better to promote.
Wirsing promised to email the TA director about the issue and by Tuesday, the references to ice and invasive species were missing from the first paragraph. Thank you. The site now states in its first sentence that our area is 4.5 hours away from Mesa Verde, 3 hours 20 minutes away from the Sand Dunes and one hour away from the Black Canyon so that makes us “a great hub location to see these national treasures!” While better than touting invasive species inspections as the top reason to come here, I’d question the logic of putting National Park convenience as the reason for future tourists to visit us. One, it’s not really convenient at all and two, there’s a boatload of real reasons to come here and enjoy the treasures of this place.
Look, I know the TA is going through some transition. But it is a well-funded organization that relies on public tax dollars. Its budget is close to a million bucks. I understand that the new executive director is pivoting to more effectively use social media and looking for ways to reach out to potential clients as opposed to waiting for retail visitors to come to us via the web.
But like any business, the website for the TA is the flagship piece for the group whose mission it is to attract visitors. The TA website is certainly deep but no one is going to jump into that pool if they are turned off at the first glimpse. From the outside looking in, it just rings flat and the web is all about being a portal for the entire world to look in at us from the outside. I know Wirsing is a guy who is more concerned with keeping the locals satisfied than in bringing in more tourists. That’s fine and is actually a legitimate stance as a way to attract more tourists – if the locals are happy, the tourists will come see why.
So the flagship site might put a tad more effort into the first thing people read when they search out the homepage. As I said at the start of this piece, there is no shortage of wonderful things to do here on a sweet summer’s day. And while finally not telling them they have to have their invasive species inspected, sending people to Mesa Verde isn’t really one of them.
Maybe Wirsing and the TA should open their minds and start reading the paper and even Norton. Perhaps then the thousands of hits that came and went all spring as people sought out information for a summer vacation in the Rocky Mountain west could have been drawn in as opposed to sent away.
 Now, I think I’ll have more coffee and figure out what to do this week.