Decatur’s New Website Goes Live
Decatur Metro | February 1, 2011 | 9:44 amToday is a big day Decatur. You’ve got a whole new look!
Don’t worry, no one replaced all the sidewalks with brick pavers and erected a bunch of “Olde Timey” streetlights…you’ve got a new website!
Gone is the cartoonish map welcome page and the poorly sorted wealth of information! In addition to an updated look, the website is now better sorted and includes many new features like an online calendar, a host of RSS feeds, and a brand-new Decatur Tourism website: VisitDecaturGA.com.
From Linda Harris’ press release…
A highlight of the Tourism website is the “Go Local” section that features Six Word Story and Itinerary vides of various Decatur residents and business owners spotlighting where they take visitors and guests and describing Decatur in just six words. The Tourism site also features Decatur’s newest blog – Visit Decatur GA.com with guest bloggers posting about events and happenings in and around the City of Decatur.
(Many of the “six word stories” created by DM readers are featured on the city’s new tourism website)
This is a long-time coming, so don’t waste another second. Head on over and check it out!
Great site! Really lets visitors know everything about our great city and will be the envy of others. Way to go Decatur!
Whoa. At the bottom of the “Demographics” page: 53% of jobs in the city are in Public Administration. I knew it was high, but that’s cra-zy.
I read that to mean not that “53% of City jobs are in public admin” but as “53% of City residents work in some type of public admin job.”
Vs. 6% for the overall population of Metro Atlanta.
Also, note that there is no “Education” category while earlier they note that Emory and Agnes are big employers for residents so I’m guessing they’ve grouped all education jobs under public admin (or maybe under services? as in public service?). Where’s the doctors and lawyers? Probably also in one of those two categories. So, with ~50% of the population boasting a bachelors degree or higher, 80%+ are employed in public admin and services.
Decatur is the county seat of gov’t– so it isn’t just City of Decatur has above 50% of its city jobs in public admin, but that the jobs that are located in the city limits are 53% public admin. Think of all the people employed by the county, the courts, the city, etc. (and yes, I’m reading this to be % of jobs located in the city limits) I think a similar stat is probably found in most cities that are county seats of government.
In before someone complains about the design or not being consulted about the content…
But seriously, where is the link to DM? That should be one of the options on the top banner!
Story in AJC says new website also allows for paying taxes and parking tickets online- pretty cool!
http://www.ajc.com/news/dekalb/decatur-parking-tickets-can-823362.html
It would be way cooler to not pay taxes at all.
I’m really liking the site’s new look/format!
I think the designer did a nice job with the designs, and the city did a nice job with content, direction, features and the overall project, so kudos to those from the city involved in the project.
I work in the online industry, and it’s my job to build and consult on sites for accessibility and search performance at the large scale. As someone that will be regularly using this site, I thought I should point out some issues with the production/development quality of the site. This is the stuff that’s easy to miss, because it’s not on the surface (and usually not known to the client), but it is just as important as what’s on the surface. I should also mention that some of this stuff is almost expected on outsourced and/or low-budget development work, but that doesn’t make it okay.
The site is produced in a very old standard (HTML4), which isn’t specifically a problem, except that it doesn’t even come close to validating or adhering to that standard:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.decaturga.com
Sites that don’t follow standards are expensive to maintain as their behavior is unpredictable from browser to browser, and they tend to break in new versions. They also tend to be less accessible to other devices, readers and search engines. Strict adherence to standards is not what I suggest, but paying attention to them is important, and I don’t see that attention in the new site. For many government sites, compliance [with section 508 standards] is required and not an option. I’m going to assume that’s not the case here.
There is also not much attention to development best practices in the code. There are a lot of inline scripts, script attributes and mostly non semantic markup. This was not uncommon 10 years ago, but this is not okay on a site produced today (at least, not one that you pay for).
But the biggest problems are that the developer(s) didn’t consider new URL structure or redirects from the old site. No site produced today should have URLs that look like this for common pages (regardless of the content management system):
decaturga.com/index.aspx?page=134
When it should have been:
decaturga.com/city/police/
More importantly, there are no “old to new” redirects in place. For example, go to the old Decatur police page:
http://www.decaturga.com/cgs_citysvcs_ps_police.aspx
What you get is a 404 “not found” page (a non-customized one at that). That 404 page will now be the most used page on the site. Minus the homepage, the City of Decatur web site will be largely off the map of Google and other search engines for weeks (or longer). Any other sites linking to decaturga.com pages are now broken, and years worth of pagerank accumulated via those links is now lost (or soon will be). This amounts to throwing away a big asset. If a company that depended upon search traffic did this, it would be suicide to their business.
The developer(s) should have accumulated all the URLs from the old site (whether automated or manually) and setup permanent [301] redirects to the new pages. No links would have been broken and all accumulated pagerank would be maintained. Doing this is neither costly nor optional when you launch a new site.
My intention is not to be negative, but I care about the quality of services that our city receives. We paid for this (though I have no idea how much). The designer did a good job, and the city did a good job… the site’s content, features and visuals are very strong. But it also looks like the development was outsourced to the cheapest bidder. I’m concerned that some of these problems could very much reduce the web site’s ability to serve it’s purpose and be accessible to it’s audience. Not to mention, sites developed in this manner are expensive to maintain and don’t last long. My hope is that won’t be the case here. I only looked at the site for a few minutes, so this is far from an in-depth analysis.
I hope I’m not raining on anyone’s parade, as there is plenty to be proud of on this site even with the development issues. I like the site on all other points.
They did put the new site out for bids – did you bid on it?
I noticed the numbered URL issue this morning too. I think these are all very valuable valid points.
And Willy’s right, when you now click the Google link for Decatur Police you get a 404 “page not found”. That’s an issue. Not to mention Google Rank. While great for DM, I’m not sure that in a few weeks time that the city will be happy to know that DM will pop up ahead of it in Google search results of all kinds. (Currently, we both have the same rank)
Willy, can this stuff be rectified at this point or is it too late?
Is there a Cliff’s Notes version of this?
Did you vote in the last election?
um, Willy? Might have been more helpful to have sent your comments directly to the webmaster than calling out the developer in a public forum…sorta comes across as sour grapes.
Didn’t come across that way to me. I thought it was a pretty thoughtful review.
I think some people were worried about this before the contract was let to a company that specializes in selling website design and maintenance to city governments who typically know nothing about website design and maintenance.
Kind of like the guys on TV who sell crappy old computers to old folks.
I found WillyC’s comments quite interesting and well thought out!
Since this is not a site that depends on search traffic for income or to sell products, it’s not going to be a devastating problem. The city doesn’t really have to worry about competition since there can only be one official City of Decatur web site. If other sites (like www.DecaturMetro.com) start showing up before decaturga.com for terms they shouldn’t, then it will likely be just temporary.
But it may inconvenience a lot of people, and make the information inaccessible (from search engines and linking sites) for quite some time. More than 2,000 of the major pages in the old site are now throwing 404s when clicked to from Google/Bing/Yahoo.The site’s pagerank might be affected, or it might not. It just depends on where the highest quality links are coming from and where they are linking. There’s a good chance that many are linking to the homepage, which obviously won’t be affected. But for any sites linking to specific pages of the old site, any pagerank coming from those will be lost with time, not to mention broken links inconvenience people and reflect poorly on all the other sites linking to decaturga.com. In addition, it’s those contextual links pointing to the inner parts of your site that are often very valuable to your site’s reputation. These links take years to build up, and it takes the sites linking to you a long time to correct (also years… if they ever bother to… or if they take the time to figure out what the new link is). So throwing out your old URLs on a large site is discarding a major asset for your site’s reputation.
I don’t care for the retro URLs (i.e., /index.aspx?page=134), and they are somewhat worse than the URL structure of the old site, but that on it’s own probably isn’t going to hurt severely (other than being ugly for publication). That’s not an inherent problem, just a just a missed opportunity, and something to fix on the next redo. But the redirects of the old URLs to the new can still be setup, and it’s something the development company should have done in the first place. It’s never too late to fix this problem. But the sooner they set them up the better. On a site like this, I would probably be more concerned about the actual traffic than the pagerank in the short term (pagerank is fairly ambiguous).
The first thing I would suggest is to setup a proper 404 page (branded like the site) to let people know things have moved around and give them a site map and search engine to find it. Then I would go into the analytics/logs and export all the URLs that get any traffic to a spreadsheet and put in the equivalent link from the new site. Then convert it to a 301 redirect list. It will likely take someone competent a day, but not much longer, to set up all worthwhile redirects. If they can’t do this in the short term for some reason, I hope they at least correct the 404 page.
Steve: we don’t bid on projects. I point out these issues because I think it’s a great site that a lot of people obviously put hard work into, but the developers got sloppy or are new at this (at least that’s how it appears). But I think the issues most likely to affect the audience short-term are relatively easy to fix.
Update: it appears someone is working on the 404 page. I just arrived at a branded 404 from Google, unlike the previous generic one. It appears to be a work in progress. A good sign! Lets see if they finish it. Maybe I just need to be patient.
WillyC,
I find both of your posts to be very educational, not just in terms of our city website but in helping me know more about why I get various errors when using the Internet. I can tell that you are well trained and up to date. Perhaps the design firm (person) selected is a creative sort that is not as current as you on url style, etc. As you say, not a bad thing since it’s not a competitive business, but we all want the very best for money invested. I hope you are correct that changes are being made and page rank will catch up within a short window. The City of Decatur has much to share and our website along with Decatur Metro :>) are ways to get our good news out to the country and beyond.
So much better!
Love it! And love the tourism site and videos!
There’s much to admire and enjoy about the new site, but gray text on gray background? Really? REALLY?
I like the mobile version, too. Looking at it from my phone.
I wish they had a direct link to Recreation. I’m having trouble finding it on the site.
City Government > City Departments > Active Living
Thank you. Found it. But I wish they could just put a direct link!