The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

Palo Alto and the Quarter Million Dollar Mistake

Dear Palo Alto:

I’m a big fan of your fair city. I have been since the first time I wandered around your downtown or hung out in Draper’s Music Center on California Avenue or rode my bike down Ellen Fletcher’s Bike Boulevard. You have your own utility company. Other than Middlefield Road and its non-existent bike lane, I like Palo Alto.

A little while ago, I decided to look through your brand new website to see if you had any parks in your beautiful town that had par courses in them. I also notice that you’ve been getting some universally negative press about it.

The other day, I was driving around and I noticed that they were even talking about it on KGO and an expert, who made remarkably similar arguments to those of Larry Magid (maybe he was the guest, actually), were scratching their heads about this new expensive horror show.

I have to say that the fact that so many people are talking about it and that your staff are dismissing their concerns with arguments that the users will like it once they learn to use it should raise many very tall red flags. I maybe misread the headline, but I thought it was Palo Alto, California, not some out-of-the-way place nearly empty of savvy internet users or web developers like, I don’t know, maybe Payette, Idaho (my hometown). Payette’s website looks like it does because that’s just good enough for Payette, a farming town on the edge of nowhere. Palo Alto, on the other hand, is the home of Hewlett Packard. There’s a university of some renown in close proximity.

I am really good at writing lists, so I’ll give you five reasons why your website is broken.

1. Too much badly written code: You wouldn’t have noticed this, being city officials and not web geeks, but your site is huge. It really has no right to be that huge—I don’t mean it has lots of content, which it does, but there’s a lot of garbage to present that content. A web development team that knows about web standards (and no web consulting firm in 2007 has any swallowable excuse why they don’t — it’s REQUIRED knowledge) could build what your consulting company did in about 20% of the code base. In 2007, we don’t build layouts in tables, we don’t festoon our source code with inline Javascript, and we don’t require 162 kB for a layout that simple.
2. The user interface is inconsistent and not well designed: The Javascript mouseover elements are erratic in some browsers. The graphical mouseover thing on the front page would have been really awesome if this site had been launched in 1998. The diffuse glow of Kai’s Power Tools and the subsequent shortcut in later versions of Photoshop is something everyone who has ever used the software even once can do. The subsections of the site are so laden with unnecessary code that there’s a visible lag between the time I click one of the top navigation headers and the display of the actual page. And just because some designer thought that the drab background was sexy doesn’t mean your senior citizens and visually impaired citizens will even be able to read the site.
3. Your Accessibility Statement is total garbage: I like that someone there knew enough to cite Section 508 but they didn’t seem to know enough to adhere to the guidelines. Your vendor thought that the solution was to provide a “text only” experience, which might not even have been the solution 10 years ago (or it might have, depending on the circumstances). It is generally agreed by everyone in the web development community that it is certainly not the answer today in 2007.
4. Open source solutions could have saved you money: Not only would you not have ended up with what you did end up with, you wouldn’t have to pay one proprietary vendor $25,000 a year to “maintain” the site. The sections of your website could have RSS Feeds that inform your citizens when something’s changed. Sections of your website could have some actual information on them, instead of links to articles deeper in. Given the popularity of local conferences in the technology industry that surrounds Palo Alto on all sides, I would estimate that there are probably as many people in the Bay Area, who could have deployed a more robust solution, as the total number of citizens of Palo Alto. Deploying these solutions cost money, yes, but a small tight group of professionals could have customized an open source CMS in a very short amount of time.
5. Search and rendering are both slow: The search returns results that seem to be useless or unexpected. For example, if I search for parks, the first result, “Neighborhood Parks”, has one paragraph of information with no links to describe where the various parks are or links to other sections of the site that might have the information I’m looking for.

Naturally, your staff defends the site, since you spent so much money on it. It’s unlikely that you have the budget to get someone else to come in and rebuild your site. You need a strategist, someone who knows how to hire a web designer. Nobody wants to admit that they hired a Mickey Mouse outfit. At least whomever built your site has something sexy (they think) to add to their portfolio. Your citizens are really unhappy, though, judging from forum posts and blogs.

I think it’s pretty lame that the entire front page of your new web site is all about congratulating the team for the hard work that they put in to build this site. The responses of your staff or others speaking on your behalf about how the citizens will like the site once they get used to it—that’s an indication that the site was really badly done.

There’s no “wait till you learn how to use the site.” A firm worth $250,000 would have done usability testing, focus groups, and would have gone through numerous iterations. At least, in the real world among those of us who build web sites for a living for other people who know a little something about the web, we don’t get paid unless all of these ducks are in a row. We don’t invoice for sites like this until we’ve fixed the myriad problems I’ve gone on and on about in this post.

I really am a fan, I promise. I just think you spent too much money on a weak solution to a problem that wasn’t clearly defined. Try to do better next time.

(Hat tip for the Valleywag tip => Ozreiuosn.)

(Note: Yeah, I got a little long-winded. I started this post at 2:30 a.m.)

Wow, I just went to that website. You basically can’t find any information without scratching your head. there used to be specific links to each park, but the list contains dead ends. The website itself is more bloated than myspace. I hate it.

Since I also grew up in Payette, I was curious about their website. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, the design of that site is total ass, but what do you expect from Payette fucking Idaho?

What I expected was something that had been made in 1996. Something like this.