WEB | Interested in last year’s news? No? Neither is Ahmad Humeid

White cloth banners have been hung on intersections and bridges in Amman announcing this year’s Jerash Festival. At the time of writing this article, less than a weeks separates us from this major culture and arts event, which, over the past two decades has managed to attract large crowds, not just of Jordanians but also from the large number of tourists and expatriates who come to Jordan during the summer holidays.

With the Festival just around the corner, I decided to check out this year’s activities. Being the web-addict I am, I decided to go to the festival’s web site at www.jerashfestival.com.jo . And guess what? I experienced time travel!

Yes, I was able to travel one year back in time to Jerash 2003, as that was the festival being promoted on the site! I even found an archive link that enabled me to check the festival’s activities in 2001 and 2002.

I am really hoping that the organizers of the conference will still manage to put up a site promoting this year’s event. Last year’s site was well designed and quite informative. Why a major Jordanian culture and art event fails to promote itself in a timely manner (read: at least a few months before the event) is really puzzling.

In any case, after I finished feeling puzzled, I decided to consult the all-mighty Google to try to find this year’s festival schedule. So I searched for “Jerash Festival 2004”. The results I got back held good news and bad news. The bad news was that quite a number of international tourism and event sites linked to the festival’s outdated web site. The good news was that these sites actually mentioned that there is a Jerash Festival this year.

But the funny thing was that this Google search did take me to this year’s schedule (in Arabic). The second search result on Google took me to the blog of my friend (and former Jordan Times reporter) Natasha Tynes, who, being a self-declared Jerash Festival fan, had written a post on her site that included a summary of this year’s planned events (if intereseted check out: http://natashatynes.blogs.com/mental_mayhem/2004/06/jerash_festival.html).

If this is not an amazing testimony of the combined power of Google and personal publishing, I don’t know what is.

The moral of this story: Jordanian institutions and companies should start taking the web more seriously. Not only are more Jordanians searching for information online, as recent studies have shown, but we also have to remember that on the web, the rest of the world is watching.

The first rule in successful web marketing is: keep you site up to date.