Before you start the real thing, it’s always good to have some people look at your website and test it. I was lucky to find some of those people within the department, mainly other PhD students with whom I engaged in a monthly discussion on qualitative research issues. Well, so far what we had in common. In fact, their backgrounds are quite diverse and all had a different focus in their research and methods they applied. With other words, this group was perfect for receiving feedback from people with different backgrounds. Thanks again folks!

By the way, the pilot test was approximately one year ago and since then the structure, functionality, and content has changed quite a bit. The pilot test feedback focused mainly on how to label the menu points and general use of language in order to make it easier for participants to understand what I asked them to do. I should also mention that the research platform was originally planned as a closed community based on participants I could interest in my project. Participation by invitation only! However, it appeared more than difficult to recruit people from within existing travel community sites (as planned) and to get a critical mass in order to start meaningful discussions on my research website. Therefore, before I launched the website, I decided to change the concept.

The platform changes mainly focused on opening up the research website for self-registration. This delayed the launch of my website for a few months, mainly due to limited time of the programmer I hired (be aware of a dependency on IT people in case you plan to develop your own platform!). I also wanted to provide more general information on climate change and tourism within an open area (access without registration) in order to make the site a bit more attractive. Well, after all these further changes and delays, I finally managed to launch the website in February 2010. Hurray! Hurray?