Good-bye, Destination Florida.
The site, which set the standard for destination portals, effectively put the Sunshine State online, and defined a new category of Web presence, is dead.
The project’s owners at Knight-Ridder and Tribune Co. concluded last month that Destination Florida wasn’t meeting their financial goals. So they pulled the plug on it.
To die at the tender age of three is a tragedy in human terms. But in cyberspace, Destination Florida was already a respected veteran, having been redesigned and remodeled, improved and enhanced until the bitter end.
And the final chapter wasn’t a pleasant one, to hear its managers tell the story. Destination Florida’s sudden demise left its staff stunned and transformed the office into every headhunter’s idea of Valhalla-a traumatic turn of events to anyone who saw the employees grow and mature into one of the best editorial teams on the Web.
Even as Knight-Ridder and Tribune Co. try to pick up the pieces of their failed joint venture, there are those who aren’t quite ready to let goflorida.com fade to black.
Executive editor and producer Jane Wooldridge is one of them.
“This was a wonderful experience,” says the seasoned journalist, who came to the site after serving as assistant travel editor at the Miami Herald. “I feel like I was a missionary journalist. We offered travelers the tools to give them the kind of vacation they wanted, not the kind of vacation their travel agent wanted.”
The site also gave users something they couldn’t find anywhere else in cyberspace back in 1994: objective, easily accessible content about Florida. Editors eschewed the bandwidth-gobbling graphics so common to the travel sites of the day (and, sadly, of this day). “While other sites were focused on what looked good, we were focused on what the reader needed,” Wooldridge says.
While the project may have failed financially, it succeeded with its audience-the thousands of people who planned to vacation in Miami, Orlando, Key West, or Jacksonville.
Reader polls confirmed what Wooldridge and her staff suspected from the beginning. All the time they spent answering e-mail messages, at times going to great lengths to get the right information for visitors, paid off. Destination Florida developed a sizable and very loyal following.
Users weren’t the only ones paying attention. Competitors marveled at how effectively the site covered a state as large and diverse as Florida. And some of them took their cues from the project. Microsoft’s Sidewalk and America Online’s Digital City can trace their heritage back to goflorida.com, as can dozens of popular online projects that are still up and running. Indeed, the neighborhood Web site concept was perfected, if not invented, by Destination Florida.
“I think imitation is a great form of flattery,” says Wooldridge.
Julie Anderson, Destination Florida’s former general manager, believes the project was ahead of the curve, too. Perhaps too far ahead of the curve for its own good.
“The dam is just starting to break on Internet advertising. If we had started a year ago, things might be different. But we started three years ago, and profit expectations were different,” she says.
Destination Florida was the first site on the Internet to offer many features that are standard today. Its booking engine with American Express is something every decent destination site aspires to today. (A booking-by-e-mail capability was introduced as early as 1995.) However, its early start meant that convincing prospective advertisers to put their faith-and money-in the project would be a struggle until the day goflorida.com shut down.
When historians write about Destination Florida, Anderson wants them to note the unfortunate timing that killed the venture.
“I want them to say it was a good idea that wasn’t really given a chance,” she says.
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