The city of Fredericton hired Ontario based esolutionsgroup to produce the new tourism website for the city of Fredericton, located athttp://www.frederictontourism.com. What exactly does the city get for $60,000 plus $20,000 per year in maintenance? Let’s take a look at the site together and see.
The Splash Screen
First off, esolutionsgroup elected to start the website with a very attractive but useless opening screen, often referred to as a splash screen, this design element is creatively thought of as a book cover for a web page but is extremely damaging to a websites ranking.
This splash screen is the first piece of property viewed by internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. It’s the retail equivalent of a store window but instead of utilizing the page to index the city of Fredericton as a tourist destination, esolutionsgroupelected to include no content at all, the result? Instead of indexing content, events and news about the city of Fredericton, search engines will simply regard the most important part of the site as an empty page, lacking even the most basic tags.
In the long run, this will ensure the city is required to pay extensive marketing costs to generate even a basic return on investment for the website.
Key META Data
For those who don’t know, a website is like a book and in that site there is in essence a write up about the site similar to the one we reference on the back cover of a book.
In web terms, we call this META data and it helps people find websites. We use this information, much the way we would use a book cover to determine where major search engines would rank a website. The city of Fredericton, and esolutionsgroup elected to waste this space, instead of packing it full of words and phrases which would help market the website, they instead choose to include far out misspellings of the cities name and keywords so common they’ll never be indexed by major search engines.
This may just seem like a petty web designer, voicing his opinion because he didn’t win the contract but it’s not, it’s an opinion shared by various local web developer firms in Fredericton from RedCow to Nictech, the website simply does not function as a quality product.
Basic HTML Errors
Ignoring the massive errors associated with keywording and META data, lets turn out attention to the most basic of website functions, the HMTL. This is the language web browsers around the world use to access the page and much like any computer language, must be written properly for browsers to interpret and display.
Certainly any web development firm would take the time to ensure their work met basic HTML requirements? Not esolutionsgroup, or at least not in the case of the tourismfredericton.com website.
The W3C group is the definite standard to which all websites are measured, failing their test is the kiss of death for a website. So how does a $60,000 website stand up to their online tests?
45 significant errors on the first content page alone, of which all 45 are critical enough to have the website not work in current or future web browsers. How important is this? Let’s just say that if the tourismfredericton.com website was a house, it would have failed even the most basic home inspection. The irony of course is that the website includes a W3C badge on it, so we know esolutionsgroup is aware of the standards.
And as for Accessibility, the term used to define how easily the website can be read by people with disabilities, the site again fails the most basic tests, with 65 errors meaning that if you have a hard time seeing, this website is not for you.
The Final Verdict
In the end, the final verdict for this website is a pretty dismal one, the site fails to meet basic web standards, it is not accessible to disabled web uses, to can not be indexed by major search engines and as Bob Gillespie of Nictech web concludes in his interview with the Gleaner, it attempts to undermine the integrity of Google using methods which the web community know better than to employ.
Any of great web development teams here in Fredericton could have build this solution for a tenth of the cost, ensuring it met basic HMTL standards, employed standards designed to be inclusive of users and assured the city of rankings in search engines.
My final verdict on this website is that it fails to deliver, and cost far more than is reasonable.
What was Fredericton’s response to this outrage? According to Information Technology chairmen Tommy Jellinek, sending $60,000 to Ontario was the best option possible becuase local web developers should “sharpen their pencils”.
I think I speak for the whole Fredericton web community when I say it’s the city and not the local, internationally recognized tax paying population who should rethink how they approach the web.
