The City of Raleigh’s new website was in the news again today. City Councilor Russ Stephenson picked it apart in an email to City Manager Russell Allen. Russ’s experience is the same as most folks’: he tried using the search engine to find something and failed utterly. When I critiqued it myself, I faulted it for simply relying on the search engine as heavily as it does. That wasn’t even considering that the search engine seems so completely broken.
My buddy Scott has built many a website in his many years of geekdom. He’s a professional. He tells me that he had seen many $500,000 websites, and what Raleigh got is not one of them.
Fortunately, I think the city’s IT staff is finally acknowledging the changes that are needed with the site. Personally, I would have liked to have seen the city start with one of the many commonly-available (and often open-source) content management systems and then written whatever custom plugins the city needs to interact with utility billing, the Parks Department’s RecLink system, and/or other services that are unique to Raleigh. There has been certainly no need to have built everything from scratch, and by going with a standard platform as a foundation the city would have a much easier time finding staffers who are knowledgeable about running it.
Whether Raleigh is too invested in this expensive but aggravatingly difficult-to-navigate website to scrap it completely is the big question. There’s no getting around the fact that what was delivered is far from ideal.
Just a note : The Website is, in fact, based on JBoss, with an Oracle Backend, and running on linux. It was, in a large part, designed by committee. Also, they paid a Red Hat approved JBoss implementer to do a good chunk of the work.
You mean, you add half a million to JBoss and this is what you get? Ouch.
At least with JBoss it shouldn’t be too daunting to make changes. But at least they could’ve started with some fundamental design principles.