The Safeway Excellence in England Awards are organised annually by the English Tourism Council to honour and encourage the best in every aspect of English tourism, from hotels to heritage attractions.
Four of the regional winners have been shortlisted for a new award category: Best Tourism Website. We review these finalists below.
Leeds castle
www.leeds-castle.com
This imaginative, easy to navigate site exudes professionalism. It combines a clear design with little touches that go beyond what you'd expect - for example, E-cards and weather forecasts on the front page.
Readers can get full information about the castle, providing historical context before any visit. And there's a choice of simple text pages or full-on interactive guides.
It's hard to find fault with this site - and we did try. Every page looks up to date, and the sole broken link we discovered seems to have since been fixed.
There is great attention to detail: the interactive golf course map, slipped unassumingly in the back end of the site, is a typically unheralded, but well produced, feature.
The Mersey Partnership
www.visitliverpool.com
Trying to cope with an enormous amount of changing information can be a difficult task, and it looks like Liverpool are having trouble keeping up.
This is, it seems, all fur coat and no knickers. A scrolling display down the left-hand side on the front looks promising. But there are only four links - why on earth bother with the scrolling bar? At best, it's like shooting ducks at a funfair, although the prize is even worse - broken links.
It's strange, because at first sight it looked bright, informative and full of information. Perhaps we caught it on a particularly bad day, but we tried two different web browsers and something on this site kept going badly wrong.
Beechenhill
www.beechenhill.co.uk
Amid the bigger corporate sites, Beechenhill is an oddity that shows what a smaller site can do with a bit of imagination. It is pitched at kids, but never patronising.
Beautifully illustrated and uncluttered, this is more like reading a picture book than navigating a website. Its structure is clear and simple. There are only a couple of interactive elements, but these - particularly the Beechenhill Timeline - are appealing and easy to use.
Also, it is perhaps the only kids' website where you can find an unsentimental depiction of a dissected lamb.
Tate
www.tate.org.uk
This big airy site is a befitting online presence for the Tate galleries. You can only applaud its consistent, sleek, minimalist design.
The interactive Explore Tate Britain feature is a good way to plan a visit, although we found some murky recesses that didn't quite seem to work.
Powered by BT Openworld, you get the feeling of a strong corporate hand at work here. It's a high quality site.
Amid the rigorous decorum, there is a chink of anarchy in the Art Forum. At Guardian Unlimited we well understand the pros and cons of unpoliced talkboards, but at the Tate, Late Review it really isn't.
