The city of Palo Alto’s new Web site is very attractive, especially when you land on a page with one of its impressive looking photographs. But there is more to creating a Web site than just eye candy. It should be practical and user friendly and it shouldn’t cost a great deal to build and maintain.
One of my concerns about Palo Alto’s new site is the choice of typeface and background color. Instead of the usual black text against a white background, it has white text and green headlines against a dark grayish background. Though I don’t like it, I could live with it if it was just on the front page, but that design element carries through to every page, making the text more difficult to read. There is a reason why virtually every publication not to mention nearly every successful Web site sticks with black text and white background.
At first I was concerned about the photos. They’re lovely but they’re also quite large and I was worried they would slow down the site. But even though they take up a lot of screen real estate, they’re not all that big when it comes to bytes downloaded, typically coming in at under 60 kilobytes. I was able to get the page to load at a reasonable speed on my PC, my Mac and even my iPhone. Still, I have heard from people with dial-up modems and even some people with higher speed connections who are unable to load the site.
The city has made a big deal out of the site’s search engine which indeed did a good job at returning results when I searched for various terms such as utilities or city council meeting. But when I tested it, it was painfully slow, which is ironic considering it’s not that big a site. Google can search through billions of documents in under a second while it took the new Palo Alto site more than eight seconds to perform a search.
The city was very smart to use a content management system (CMS) for the site, but it would have been a lot smarter had it picked an open source CMS program rather than pay big bucks for a proprietary one. With a content management system, any authorized employee can quickly update the site, which is terrific. The last thing a dynamic organization needs is to have to wait for a developer to add content to a site. But instead of paying a reported $132,695 for the CMS, Palo Alto could have used any one of several excellent free open source content management systems. I also wonder why the city needed to spend an additional $92,400 in design fees.
Just this week I helped launched a new site at www.connectsafely.org. We considered using a proprietary CMS but instead opted to use Joomla, a free open source solution. We did that partially to save money but also to make sure that we weren’t beholden to a single developer. If something goes wrong with our site, there are thousands of developers who can fix our code and we’ll never have to pay a penny for the software or upgrades. Our programmer charged us $4,500 to build the site and we paid $1,000 for a design consultant and an additional $1,500 for a graphic artist. Our $7,000 site is engineered to handle thousands of pages of content – including video and user supplied material – and can accommodate millions of visitors. Annual maintenance costs, if any, will be in the hundreds of dollars, not the $25,000 that Palo Alto plans to spend. It costs us about $150 a year to host it on a very robust server. I recently built three other sites using WordPress – another free CMS. They serve thousands of visitors a day and host a great deal of content yet cost nothing to build or maintain except a little bit of my time. And unlike Palo Alto’s site, the site’s search engine returns results instantly.
Guy Kawaski – a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is managing director of Garage Technology, author of several best-selling books and former Apple evangelist – recently launched Truemors.com, a high visibility site where users post their own “news” stories. Kawasaki said he spent a total of $12,000 to build the site, and that included his legal fees.
I’m not suggesting that the city of Palo Alto could have built a site quite as cheaply as our nimble little nonprofit, but I find it hard to imagine how the city could have managed to spend as much as it did for what it got.
As per information, the site is fine. But I don’t think the layout of the site is particularly good when it comes to helping the user find information. The information is there but one could argue that the use of graphics and marketing material does more to sell the city to outsiders than provide information resources to those of us who live or work here.
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