March 15, 2009 - City of Thunder Bay Launches New Web Site
The City of Thunder Bay just recently launched their new web site at www.thunderbay.ca. I have had dozens of people ask me for my opinion on the new site so I thought I would share it in my blog.

Graphics and Layout
Personally, I think the City did a good job. They didn't overdue any animation or flash and nicely integrated the movies into the banner. There may be a few design elements that I would change but overall I think they did a good job. Remember, it is a Municipal web site and it has to look both professional and be usable.

Performance
Ooops, not sure what they were thinking or if they forgot to test the site. If you use TBayTel as your ISP the site loads fast, but if you use Shaw Cable or another ISP it takes over 12 seconds to load the home page. Web sites should always load in less than 5 seconds or you risk your visitors instantly going elsewhere before the page even loads. You can test the results using a web site called www.pingdom.com . One of the web sites just launched by TBayIT, loads in 3.2 seconds and has even more images/graphics then the city site (click here to compare).

Accessibility
In the press releases the City was bragging about the accessibility standards they followed to ensure the site was available to everybody. Yes they did include a font size changer and a text only mode but their site does not validate to W3C standards set out for web sites. You cannot firmly say your site is accessible unless you adhere to these standards (that's why there are standards).

However, I will admit that it can be difficult to meet these standards after I give the "keys" of the web management system to my clients as they have to be knowledgeable with these standards to continue to adhere to them. Typically web sites with Content Management Systems don't often validate perfectly due to that reason. It should also be said that even if you don't meet these standards it does not mean your site will not work, if still check your site using various browsers and operating systems you can ensure that it works for everybody even not meeting the W3C standards.

• If you are interested in seeing how the Thunder Bay web site does or want to check your own sites follow this link (only 140 errors the last time I checked).

Broken Links
Typically when a large web site is upgraded to a completely new system it is important to realize that all of your old incoming links from other people's web sites will now go to 404 error pages. It is important to place strategic redirects so that all these sites that link to you do not link to your error pages. The City missed the boat on this especially with extremely popular links like their events calendar that used to be at www.thunderbay.ca/eventcalendar which is now a 404 error page.

Please note: They have now fixed this for their calendar

Forget the www, forget it
When the site launched, they forgot to create the host header for thunderbay.ca (only www.thunderbay.ca worked so that any incoming links without the www or when anybody types in the link without the www the site would not load). I am happy to report that they have also fixed this.

Search Engine Optimization
There are tons of things I can nit-pick that they didn't do but I am sure they will as time goes on. For instance, their page titles are too short and non descriptive. For example, in the doing business section the page title is simply "doing business". When people google and see this page in the google results, it will only show up as "doing business" when it should be something like"Doing Business in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada" and even include other key words that people will search often.

Conclusion
Overall, the City did a good job, I love the collage at the bottom of the home page and the integrated movies. It is understandable that there will be things to fix and clean up, especially with a site of this magnitude. My biggest problem is the performance, the City has to fix this as it doesn't matter how nice your site is, if it takes too long to load you will loose visitors. I can't say whether their servers are overloaded or their connection isn't large enough to handle the bandwidth but whatever the reason, I hope they fix it sooner than later as we live in world of instant responses and real-time communication.