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My review of Sitka, Alaska

My new friend Mark Danielson asked me to do a review of Sitka, Alaska thank you for the idea for review and I hope that you still want to be firends afterwards *smile*

http://spiritofcitywebs.com/node/51

Sitka, Alaska
http://www.cityofsitka.com/

This is a small city and like a lot of the small cities it does not fit in to “city template” that I have found. This is not a good or a bad thing it just make it harder to do a comparison criticism of the site. I also understand that content production in a small city is much harder to get when a city has a small staff. I love the homey feel of the site it is not overly professional and feels like I can get a great understanding of the happening of the city from watching the news feed. (is there an RSS for that?) Love the pictures I know that it is beautiful up there would love to see more of that and I like the credits on the pictures. Here is were I could see a good place for growth in design. Things that I would suggest for a site like this is a clear separation between the site wide navigation and the divisional and topical menus. This allow for a greater ability to expand the site as it is need. The second thing that I would recommend is a search engine. Google custom search is great for a site like this. it is simple to set up, free to the government, more powerful then a keyword search and gives results in methods that is easy to understand by most people. (http://www.google.com/coop/cse/) I would also start working on some of the standard pages that most city websites have about there website it self, disclaimers, privacy, information collection and accessibility would be a good starting list.

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Mark Danielson

Wow Steve,

Thank you.

Excuses: Our website is ad-hoc with Departments posting randomly and all of trying to get something going. No web Committee. No person specifically in charge of the site. Webmaster is overloaded doing PC tech and support work.

We had one web page in 2000. And now, just what I suspected; sort of a mess.

Thank you again and I am honored to be your friend. – Peace and be safe – MD