Thursday, May 10, 2012

New Town of Smyrna Website...and problems

The town of Smyrna has rolled out a new layout for their website. The old system was a bit problematic for me so I'm hopeful this is a well tested and user friendly setup. I wish that our blog that has been reporting on issues and trying to connect people to our community was listed under media...7 years and and still going strong. The Meetings and Events section is real nice. They have a small part of it on the main page, but the larger calendar is well filled out and a great resource.

Council Missing
I found that I could not find a direct link to the Town Council. Unless I am overlooking it, there seems no way to find it directly. I finally found it by looking on the meetings and agenda page, that was directly linked, and noticed that this page was a sub-page to the council page. I say jokingly "What are they hiding?"...but it seems they're hiding the council. The council page is seemingly part of the 'Department' pages, but the general department pages is also a link I do not see...That's one I normally use the most outside of the contact page, on the old site.

404 Issue
They have made one small error...maybe not so small when you look at it. Most people look up information on Google, and a good example would be the town centre. If you went to Google, searched for 'Smyrna Town Centre', you would find that all of the links that Google has are now bad. Instead of using the old internal links, they changed them all...so until Google re-maps the website and the old address slowly fade, the people searching for information might find it hard to get said information. This extends to all the internal links that Google pulls up for me. Smyrna has removed their selves from the search results for the largest search engine in the US, and likely others.

Examples
Here is the address Google Returns
http://townofsmyrna.org/towncentre/index.asp

Here is the new address for the Town Centre
http://www.townofsmyrna.org/Departments/TownCentre.aspx

All new websites have a break-in period where they polish it and make it work better, but they would have to re-link all the pages to overcome the Google issue.

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