Inside Village Teams receive web training

Participants of the first ever Inside Village Website Competition are now better equipped to develop websites, which will promote the unique aspects of their villages, following training by local marketing communications Firm Accela Marketing.

The competition is part of the ‘I Can’ technology sensitization and publicity campaign of the Education Enhancement through Information and Communication Technology Programme (EEICTP) and urges village teams to use ICT to build a website to promote Saint Lucia’s villages as tourist attractions.

Team training was held at the Central Library in Castries on Tuesday, May 14, 2013 and was facilitated by Accela Marketing.

The company’s managing director Agnes Francis says the teams now have the tools needed to create quality websites, which will promote the villages.

“We came up with the concept of the Inside Village Website Competition, where each village team would design a website, extolling what is unique about a village, its attributes, features, tourism assets and this would be judged. All the websites could be used by the St Lucia Tourist Board to promote these towns and villages,” she said, adding that Accela’s vision was to create a sustainable initiative that would last beyond the life of the project and bring economic benefits to the community.

The training session focused on areas such as utilizing web templates, creating pages and linking the websites to social media pages.

The EEICTP’s administrative assistant Ann Jean Baptiste says organizers are looking forward to high quality entries.

“We expect the teams which have been selected to provide quality websites which will showcase their communities. The project aims to link community to school and community to the libraries and we hope, through this competition, to realize this objective,” she said.

Coordinator of the Vieux Fort team Egbert Fanus says the hands-on training gave participants the confidence and skills needed to meet the requirements and standards of the competition.

“It was a good initiative by organizers,” he said. “The training covered website building and design. We focused on specific technical aspects of website building such as Word Press. It was very helpful.”
Villages within ten districts are taking part in the competition. Each village website will be judged by a panel and the team with the best website will win Information Communication and Technology (ICT) prizes.

All participating villages will benefit, as the websites will be used by the Ministry of Tourism to promote the areas.