Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Wyre Forest District Council website

So having visited the website in a pointless search for information I spot a few things.

Here's my first target "From 30th June to 25th July any person interested may inspect the council's accounts for the year ended 31st March 2008.". That is any person who can get to Duke House "on any working day between 9.30am and 4.00pm". Welcome to the 19th Century.

On the "What's on" front we get an advert for the Kidderminster Arts Festival being held between the 16th and 30th of August, hmm fair enough it's not as if anything else is happening earlier.

You could always check out the rest of the news if the link didn't point to a local computer 192.168.1.20.

I'm sorry I'm just fed-up of thinking "Hey I wonder what's going on with X" and then crashing to a halt because the most logically place for me to find out just squirrels the information away. I mean just look at the search page you can't constrain the search by date and the results give no form of synopsis as to how the search term is referred.

Searching for "raven street" gives me "Taxi Ranks" on the second page why? Because the default search is for raven OR street with higher placements for those documents that contain both; try searching for "raven street" with the quotes and the previous 189 results drops to 4.

Now are you seriously telling me that the phrase "raven street" doesn't occur more then 4 times on the whole website including all the linked pdf documents of agendas and meetings. Nope of course not and that's because pdf files etc. aren't indexed. Yep as I've said before, the best way to search this website is by using Google, how sad is that?

Lest anyone think I'm picking on WFDC the Worcestershire Hub is almost as bad, difficult to navigate and splitting information across not just different pages but different sections. Slow to update and as I type currently off-line.

Both of them need to have a look at the Stourport town site. It's not perfect but then again, other than me, what is?

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

In fairness, the best way to search every website is Google. Very few other search engines even come close.

What can I say? Building an engine that actually finds the information humans are looking for is actually quite challenging. It should be left to professionals!

(Dudging by the RFC-1918 IP address, whoever built this thing does not count as a “professional”…)