Loudoun County Government Website Migration GOOFS

Re: What morons run the Loudoun County Government Website?

Thanks Erika, I really appreciate your comment.

 

Re: What morons run the Loudoun County Government Website?

Cliff, having developed large websites, as well as managed large web projects for years, I can tell you that you would be flabbergasted by the amount of people who don't type URL's in their address bar anymore. Many folks prefer to simply type the site name in the search box, and then click on the first hit that comes up. That's why it's so important for any web presence these days to get prime/proper placement within Google and other search engines. Otherwise, you could end up a ghost town...

In regards to the LoCo govt website, I have often had to rely on Google to find information located on that site, because the built-in search capabilities of the original site were basically non-existent/useless. So instead of clicking left and right to get to something, it's sometimes much easier to just search for it on Google and have it 'take me' to the information I'm looking for on that site. All search engines will allow you to restrict your search results to a particular site, which makes it even more valuable.

 

Re: What morons run the Loudoun County Government Website?

Yes, their new domain is starting to get some traction so it's starting to converge a bit. Probably in a few more weeks the direct loundon.gov will have fully converged. Probably too late for the election tho

Business is tough. Where I work we do not tolerate poor decision making. People are human and mistakes happen - its to be expected. But haphazard actions are signs of deeper issues. More robust methods are designed to isolate mistakes, and try to correct them quickly. I've always tried to hire people that have very sound systematic thinking over people necessarily with specific knowledge. Knowledge can be taught, methodology is harder to teach and some will just never get it.

People like mechanics, etc sometimes are the best hires - way more then a college degree guy with lots of book smarts. They have the ability to systematically work through something they may not initially be familiar with.

My motto is 'start with what you know.. and build towards the answer'. People that jump to the answer without validating all the intermediate steps are doomed to be wrong often and destroy their credibility when they do so. Some may think its the tortoise instead of the hare - but when the tortoise is right and can prove it and show WHY... they always come back to him

The right answer without 'why' often is not nearly as useful.

It's kind of like partial credit in school.. the right answer without the method was not worth any points. But here, the 'points' are your credibility with the customer - because everyone is a cynic, especially when your answer will point the work back to them

There is often a huge difference between 'what you think' and 'what you know'. When sorting customers (be it internal or external), it is especially important to understand the difference - especially for yourself

Ok - I'm rambling too much about my work now..

 

Re: What morons run the Loudoun County Government Website?

That assumes you know where the loudoun website is to start with

Google for 'loudoun county government' - the new webpage isn't even on the first page! And clicking on any of the first 5 links would have given you a blank error page until just the other day.

Plus, you'll find often that Google's relevancy engine is much better then many website's own search engines. Often info you can not find while browsing the site directly, you can find via Google. This conditions users to start gravitating towards using the search engines before they actually browse to the site. This behavior is ramping up radically - especially with the integration of search engines into the desktop, the browser bar, etc.

Google is rapidly going to be the most influential company in the world. Information is EVERYTHING - and they are becoming the single portal to it. They will be the doorman to virtually everything. That kind of power is unheard of - and the wild thing is NO ONE gave them this power - its purely self-made through RESULTS not marketing or hyping (though arguably the inclusion of google tools into so many installers now is pretty overzealous IMO).

I noticed! I thought I was going to have to make an onsite visit

 

Re: What morons run the Loudoun County Government Website?

As part of your decision process - one of the criteria should be 'if we can't do it well, we shouldn't do it at all'. The problems I ID'd about the site could have been fixed with 10mins of work. They also should have NEVER been there to begin with. The reasons the problems were there had nothing to do with time or resources. It would have been lack of planning or an error in execution. The planning side is inexcusable. It would be like you driving down the highway without realizing you should have closed your car door. It's that obvious to anyone who has ever been responsible for content on the web.

When you move ANY content, you always consider what points to that content. Here, they moved an ENTIRE SITE and didn't account for that.

How many hundreds if not potentially thousands of loudoun county documents, web pages, hand-outs, flyers, signs, emails, etc do you think are sitting RIGHT NOW with the old address still on them? Virtually everything. Every single one of those went to a black hole. Not accounting for that is simply inexcusable in that profession.

And this is just the BASICS! What they should have done is actually redirected you from the old content to the new content for each request. That's the RIGHT way of doing it. But the complexity of doing that really depends on a lot of factors. A professionally ran site would make that seamless. Requests for an individiual page would have been redirected, or rewritten on the fly so that content requests would land where intended or softly to guide the user.

Nope! Not even a 404 page at all. So unless you knew anything about the technology you would have been clueless to what was going on.

If I were to make errors of this magnitude, feel free to. I'd be the first to acknowledge it. But we also have to acknowlege the expectations of a private, local website like this, compared to a commercial or government website with an audience and userbase 10 to 100x size the audience we have here. Let alone the dependancies (on literature, signage, media, etc) that a site like Loudoun would have compared to us. Differences like these are why you can justify having a full time, professional staff to run a large public site, and you don't here.

Errors like these you wouldn't even allow on your home website, let alone a central portal for an entire government!

How would you feel about a company you bought something from and every reference in their manuals went to an error page? Or when you searched for it on the web, the results from the company itself all went to an error page? You wouldn't feel so confident in the company's operation now would you? You might even go as far as it say they aren't well run or clueless about the web.

 

I discovered it after work hours and our buddy Jakub was notified by someone by the next morning. I had not used the 'contact us' links immediately because a few reasons

1) I didn't have my work email access handy
2) their 'contact us' pages only feed a generic 'webmaster' email rather then say a form submission

Anyone who has been on the receiver side of any generic addresses like 'root', 'webmaster', 'hostmaster', etc knows that those accounts get 99.99% spam constantly and many sites never read those emails at all because of the huge spam overload. I passed on sending an email into that abyss and before I could really do anything much the next day at work, jakub had been tipped off to our discussion here.. and made some changes.

If someone was really mean spirited they would have notified 'big wigs' within the county and illustrated what the changes meant to them personally in a very important time of year. But contrary to what some believe, my posts were not intended to get someone in trouble, but as a commentary.

 

It's not my job to do theirs. Not my fault they couldn't do theirs right. It's a paid position by my taxes - so yes, I have the right to be critical in how my government is doing their job. It's called commentary - we were born free to it here.

I don't get paid to build and maintain a website of that scale - apparently you have some skin in the game.

And its not about being perfect - its about being fundamentally sound. Doesn't sound like that is important to you... and probably why the site was goofed up to start with.

... and yet all the facts remain the same and true. If the loudoun.gov website is so big and important, why isn't it ran like it?

You are right, the county website is a vast and important site - and I expect it to be ran like that as well. When you put up things on the public net, you open yourself to review and criticism.