A website is a pretty personal thing. When you start a conversation with a potential client about what is good and bad about their current website, you have to be pretty cautious.  The person you are talking to may have built the website.  Maybe they built it by hand in notepad and are exceedingly proud of it, secretly fishing for compliments.  One wrong move and you not only offend someone, you also lose a client.

That being said, from the official Twitter account for the town of Faro, Yukon sent out this tweet on Friday, August 6 2010, so I guess they're fair game.  The tweet reads "have put out a call for opinions on the Town's website - I didn't design it, I don't love it. Give me your thoughts http://bit.ly/booKxY".  So here are my thoughts.

Layout in tables is a bad idea
Anyone who has been building websites as long as I have is guilty of it.  Heck, back in the mid 90's it was pretty much the standard way of laying out your website. But tables for layout are bad, bad.  They bloat your pages with unneeded code, and hide your content from search engines.  My all-time favorite explanation of why tables are bad for layout is a 2003 presentation by Bill Merikallio and Adam Pratt entitled Why Tables for Layout is Stupid.

But, though much maligned in the web design world, tables do have their place.  For an excellent treatment of what tables are good for and how to use them properly, check out Cameron Chapman's blog post Better UI Design: Proper Use of Tables.

SEO, page titles, URL and on-page optimization
I'm sorry to break it to you, but when one of your citizens or a visitor wants to find out something about your city, it's services or attractions, they're not going to go to your website.  They're going to Google.  Making the pertinent information on your website easy to find is just as important for a city as it is for a business.

Google is the big daddy in this space.  Make your pages attractive to being indexed by Google (ok, and other search engines) and people will find the information they're looking for.

Sure, making your site easy to navigate is important, but you have to get the visitors there in the first place.  What happens when I google "tourism in yukon canada"? Faro isn't on the first 10 pages.  What about "jobs in yukon canada" not there either.  Maybe Faro is taking the motto "Yukon's best kept secret" a little too far.

Some things Faro could do to make themselves more visible?

• Descriptive page titles for every page
• Human readable URLS
• On-page optimization based on some keyword discovery process
• Engage a top-notch SEO company to make sure you get found

Don't skimp on design
It's so tempting to focus only on the content of the site.  But the reality is that all of the optimization in the world won't help you if your site is ugly. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" they say.  Wrong!  Beauty is not subjective, it has been quantified.

A professional designer will keep one eye on current trends and one eye on what is traditionally held to work long-term.  The resulting design will be attractive and modern, but lend itself to periodic updates to keep it current.  This is unfortunately the one area that city websites usually fall short. 

Design is about evoking emotion in the viewer. Which town would you rather visit?  Which town would you rather live in?  I'm sure Faro is much more senic than sleepy little Cameron, Texas, but you would never know it by the design of the websites.

Accessibility
At this year's South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas, the Knowbility booth had a demonstration that really brought it home for me.  A woman named Desi sat people down at her computer and put headphones on them.  Then she navigated to the person's website so they could experience it the way she did.  She is blind and uses a special software package that literally reads the website to you....warts and all.

It's a real eye-opener.  You experience how important it is to have alt tags on all of your images.  You experience first hand what a catastrophe Flash is.  And then you hear the punchline.  Google is blind too.  So if you fix the accessibility problems, you get the added benefit of enhanced SEO.  Yay!

Modern Updatability
I'm not sure what kind of platform the existing Faro website was built on, but judging from the ".asp?" in the address bar, I'm guessing it's been there a while.  Probably long enough to predate modern Content Management Systems. How do they update their website in Faro?  I'm not sure, but I'll bet it involves someone with a fair amount of web development experience and a lot of knashing of teeth.

A CMS is a software platform that allows the users to easily update the website content online, and in real time with little or no knowledge of HTML, CSS or any programming language.  There are several out there both open and closed source.  I prefer Drupal because it is a free (great price) open source product that is maintained by a worldwide community of developers.  It also scales well to the enterprise level which is important for a city that is always looking for new ways to use their website to make their jobs easier and lives better for their constituents.

Updated content also has another side effect.  When you update your website Google has to come index it again.  More visits to your site means a higher Page Rank.  Higher PR means better placement in search results.

So, @FaroYukon you have my suggestions. 

• Ditch the tables
• Spend some time and money on good SEO
• Hire a professional development firm with a good design staff to give you a modern look and feel
• Make your site accessible to people with disabilities
• Get a good CMS so you can keep your site updated with fresh content

I hope it didn't sting too much.  If it makes a difference, I think it's really cool that you asked for feedback on Twitter.  It shows that you're a forward-thinking town that's not afraid of embracing the new.  Now you just need a website that screams that to the world.

Feel free to give me a call anytime if you'd like to talk.

James