Much noise was heard in Palm Bay as the city’s website, long an eyesore compared to surrounding Brevard cities, was updated over the weekend. The most obvious change is the city’s cohesive look throughout the site. Previously, each section had a tendency to look different than other sections. That has all improved.
However, the site uses what is known as a “tables-based layout“, a relic of web design that has been phased out over three years ago. Modern sites employ strictly CSS (cascading style sheets) to structure and present the content. Aside from faster rendering, the reason web designers use such “semantic markup” is because future changes can be done much quicker, and thus, with less cost. Tables-based layout design is much bulkier, harder for search engines to index, and can be a nightmare for those trying to implement even small changes. As XHTML and CSS options came on the horizon over five years ago, top-notch firms began making the switch. Nearly everyone has abandoned the old tables-based layout schema, especially for new sites and redesigns.
How did the city get snookered into paying for this? The initial home page of the new site rings in at a whopping 255k, far and above the recommendations of even liberal design firms. While broadband is becoming ubiquitous quickly, almost half of all internet accounts are still dialup. One wonders what those people do while they are waiting for the home page to load. While the tables are somewhat to blame (doubling the size of the code as opposed to more modern coding techniques), the images are the chief culprit. The head banner at the top of each page is 151K. We were able to reduce it to 44K with no noticeable change in its appearance. Further compression (with some image quality loss) would also be possible.
Worse, even the most simple search engine friendly techniques, such as the implementation of meta keyword and description tags, a robots.txt file, and a sitemap.xml file were all missing. It almost seems as if Palm Bay is purposely trying to not be well-indexed. But of course, if that were the case, they would have a robots.txt file indicating that to search engines.
There’s much more, but we don’t want to get into a “Web Design 101″ here on Brevard Outlook. Suffice to say that it would be interesting to hear the debacle of how the city payed for such a thing, believing it to be hot new technology, when in fact they got a three-year old website (at best) that will cost thousands more to update than had the bought a modern revision. The city should seriously consider hiring a professional web firm to update and fix these items immediately. While the site might look nicer than before, the city is missing out on some real benefits.
3 comments.
on October 10th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Well, at least Palm Bay isn’t the only city in Florida struggling with putting up a modern, functioning, website. Looks like the new MiamiDade.Gov just got slammed for a bunch of the same faux pas.
on October 10th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
LOL — they display the W3C “Valid XHTML” badge, and their site DOES NOT VALIDATE as valid!
on October 18th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Hometown News reporter Rolanda Hatcher-Gallop wrote a promo piece for the October 17 Bay Bulletin in which she had not one professional web developer look at the site for an objective evaluation. Instead, ten Palm Bay residents were asked their opinion, some of which admittedly had never seen the old site. We did learn from the article, however, that the city never did higher a professional web development firm, either for consultation or development. Turns out, a single employee, Stacy LaVanture, spent a year to “revamp” the old site while also working on her other duties.
Meanwhile, more problems and errors continue to crop up. Most notably we’ve learned that a vast majority of the links were changed, with no proper forwarding to the new link, leaving hundreds (possibly thousands) of external links on the internet now ringing 404 errors.
We’ve also given the city and the “webmaster” (as Stacy refers to herself on the website) an opportunity to respond and make corrections. Thus far… nothing.
What do you think?
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