It's actually a step backwards.
1) Incredibly, it promotes Lehigh County. I thought I saw Tom Muller over here recently and now I know why. The slideshow at the homepage header is a promotion of the Penn State Extension in Lehigh County. It depicts Mack, Amazon and Olympus. All three are Lehigh County companies. I would think a Northampton County webpage would promote its own businesses. And if we are going to promote a Lehigh County operation, why does it have to include one like Amazon, which came under heavy criticism when it was forcing employees to work in 110 degree heat?
2) No direct link to online payments. The right sidebar of the home page includes links to what are called "online services." Amazingly, it includes no direct link for the payment of real estate taxes. It also fails to include a direct link for the payment of fines and costs in criminal cases. Thus a casual user of the webpage would be unaware that he can pay both real estate taxes and fines online. There should be direct links for both,and they should be listed with "online services."
3) No Direct Link to Custody Petitions. Unfortunately, custody disputes have become commonplace. Many of the people visiting the courthouse are there to seek custody or modify an existing order. In another sign of the times, many of these people have no attorney and leave with petitions they take home and present to a motions judge the next day. if the county is interested in providing service to the community, a link to this custody complaint should be available online.
4) No direct link to county mapping. One of the most fascinating services provided by Northampton County is its interactive mapping, including aerial maps from 2015, 2010 and 2008. This invaluable and underutilized service needs to be better known, and should be featured as part of the "online services."
5) No direct link to Council meeting videos. The old page, which was operating just fine on Sunday, had a direct link to the videos of Council meetings from the homepage. That link is now gone, and a person who wants to watch the meeting will have to find it on the Council page. To view the meetings, you must still install Microsft Silverlight, which is inoperable on Apple products and most versions of Chrome. This shortcoming should have been fixed.
6) No direct link to the courts. There is no direct link to the courts' webpage in "online services." That includes valuable information concerning trial lists, argument lists, miscellaneous hearings and jury service.
6) The County Giveth, and the County Taketh Away. I do like the link to court opinions, which seems to be more inclusive than what existed at the courts' webpage. But another problem has been created. On the court's webpage, if you click to look at their opinions, you now get this message: "Service Unavailable. HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable." It should instead link directly to the opinions page on the county site. Most attorneys looking for a court opinion will be looking in the courts' webpage, not the county's.
7) County Council Members Promote Themselves. District Attorney John Morganelli is a politician, as are Executive John Brown and Controller Steve Barron. Yet they included none of the usual self-promotional pictures. But Council Council just had to include nine color pictures of themselves. Incumbent protection, you know.
Conclusion: This much ballyhooed webpage is worse than the one it replaced. It completely fails to link citizens with the important county services they actually use,promotes businesses outside the County, fails to make meeting videos accessible to one and all, but promotes incumbent council members. As usually happens in the Brown administration, no effort is made to test a system with the actual end users because that would require them to come down to earth. The result is an inferior product.
Bernie did in house staff do this or was outside staff hired?
ReplyDeleteI think this was in-house.
ReplyDeleteAl should know better and field test it first...not a hard thing to do.
ReplyDeleteThe last website was hardly usable. It was designed by inept grade-schoolers.
ReplyDeleteVaughn was supposed to be spearheading this effort for County Council and helped I think
ReplyDeleteMuch agreed...this is because Zerox the county's I.T. wanted to do the website themselves instead of reaching out to an outside company with experience in website development. Same ole same ole....
ReplyDeleteIt's not just the website Bernie. Most of what Northamption County (as well as most of what government does) needs to be outsourced to private industry.
ReplyDeleteThe size of government can be reduced by 95%, with service improved to the citizens by contracting out most services to the private sector.
Once again politics is the focus. Who would of thought this about our wonderful County Council who couldn't show up or stay for the final budget sessions. These arrogant and useless politicos have to go!
ReplyDeleteBernie,
ReplyDeleteThis is the regionalistZ at work, I don't know what it looks like but I am very sure it is colurful and has many charts and graphs with a wording twistZ that we as vally residence have all seen before. The i t teamZ are in on this suposid CURE and asset selloff of everything and anything tangible and not, like the cambells soup can I am sure there is a lot of redd that never is not able to be seen by public eyes?
The wfmz site is the same way, lots of colurful diolog and tall tailZ of the attractional kind without much substance backing theZe tailZ. This is almost like my incessant babble except there is verifiable third party print backing truths.
REpublican redd
not a party favor in any manner
Northampton County website is functionally useless. It's like Allentown's. All show and tell, but doesn't provide any real service other than puff puff information.
ReplyDeleteWFMZ's website it to be informative It kinda does that but it's about as useless as that quaint little station on top of South Mountain always has been since it went on the air 40 years ago.
That's embarrassing. Having buildings that aren't in the county on the website is amateur hour.
ReplyDelete10:05 is right. The new WFMZ website is trash. I've wondered if it's on purpose to hide the dearth of local news web content post Randy Kraft.
Northampton County put the K back in kwality. Outstanding work!
ReplyDelete"...this is because Zerox the county's I.T. wanted to do the website themselves instead of reaching out to an outside company"
ReplyDeleteI'd sat the problem is that it was never tested with actual end users. This is a mistake made often by people who think they know everything. The Brown admin also made this mistake with its civil docket search It was flawed bc it was never tested with the people who actually use it. I have no problem with mistakes. We all make them. But I do have a problem when the same mistake is made over and over.
"The size of government can be reduced by 95%, with service improved to the citizens by contracting out most services to the private sector."
ReplyDeleteThis was done by Xerox, I have learned. Kinda' defeats your point.
The contractor works to the specification of the RFP, written by the County. If that's what they ordered, that's what Northampton County received. So sorry.
ReplyDeleteI doubt the county called for pics of Lehigh County businesses.
ReplyDelete... and I have yet to address the mobile site, which is even worse. This is just terrible workmanship, and you are not sorry. You couldn't care less, as evidenced by the smug response.
ReplyDeleteExcellent critique, Bernie. As a frequent user of the site, I can relate to most all of the points you addressed. You let us know about the payments that can be made, which I was unaware of. Great post! I am sorry to hear that once again, a NorCo product sucks.
ReplyDelete