Besthalaltravels.com: incorporating user experience sharing for muslim travelers / Shamsudin Razali

This research is intended to address and record the travel website contents and the need of the Muslim communities to search for relevant Muslim content. Web observation method was used to identify the content available in these travel websites. The researcher visited 134 travel websites to observe their contents and applications. The finding shows that the Muslim or Islamic contents still lack in term of content and popularity, where less than 10% of the visited websites have the Muslim or Islamic contents. Furthermore, according to Alexa the global web metrics and analytics provider, only www.crescentrating.com is ranked below 300,000 and all the other Muslim websites were above 1 million marks. The aim of this research is to design and develop a BestHalalTravels.com prototype website by in corporating travel experience sharing. The membership, collaboration method and other Muslim contents were used to spur and attract the online community to visit the websites. Within a short time span since go live on Jun 2012, the BestHalalTravels has attracted an average 40,000 traffics per month, 59 members and more than 3425postings. This has resulted Alexa ranked BestHalalTravels below 2 million marks and has identified community in Pakistan as the most visited country to the website. Here is the quote from Alexa, "The site is relatively popular among users in the city of Karachi (where it is ranked #4,764). We estimate that 82% of the site's visitors are in Pakistan, where it has attained a traffic rank of 18,040". Hopefully, this new website will encourage more researches to address the Muslim needs while traveling specially to non-Muslim countries.