Back To School

A while back I opined on the influence of location based services on hyperlocal blogs and web sites. The weak link in the chain to making mobile location-based services like Radar or Yelp! useful is the piss-poor ways in which local governments, school districts, news outlets and related institutions organize information on their websites. This lack of any rational information organization also makes for useless (and very expensive) web sites that fail in their mission to inform the users and create less work (not more) for the staff.

Take, for example, the website for the Bedford Central Schools, which my daughters attend. It’s very pretty and all but it’s not actually very useful. Where can I sign up for email alerts? Where are the RSS feeds? Where can I find an email address?

This site is actually built off of a template sold to the district by School World, a company that has a chokehold on the school district web site market. The site is designed to look pretty and throw a lot of content at parents but not really say much of anything.

When the site was in its planning stages, a note went out to all the parents in the district directing us to a web site with three or four sample designs and asking us which one we liked best. No one ever asked what we would actually want from a web site. Like maybe all the forms we might need for our children linked right on the main page. Or an online system for us to report absences so we don’t clog up the school’s phone and take up the office staff’s time in the morning. Or a direct link to the school principals’ email addresses so we don’t have to dig through four different pages to find it.

And because the site is based on a template that the district paid (handsomely, I’m sure) for, there’s no way for the district to add functionality or otherwise customize the site down the road. I’m sure they sold the district on things like ‘your staff won’t have to learn complicated HTML.’ I’m also sure it’s based on proprietary technology. The site itself doesn’t use doctypes and buries the content in a nest of tables and other noodley code. Honestly, the district is lucky there isn’t anyone else around here with any Google juice.

O’Reilly’s Vannessa Fox has a list of practical tips for local government web sites that make a lot of sense. Things like crawlability and extensive use of alt tags would help. Unfortunately, as long as companies like School World are selling crappy web sites to local school districts, her advice will probably fall on deaf ears.

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