UPDATE: The new rating is up in the 90’s now, so we are gaining steam. I’m glad to see that the site is performing better! But they need to work on the search engines.
I didn’t have high expectations for the new city website, siouxfalls.gov. Even if they chose a good vendor and spent (I think $250K) on the redesign, I knew there would be all kinds of ways they would make it difficult for citizens to access the site.
It’s overall performance rating is 37%. A web developer told me with the kind of money the taxpayers spent on this redesign, and the use of actual coders, the website should have an overall rating of 90% or higher.
Besides it’s awful performance, they have hidden the agenda page. When you first click on the link all you get is a calendar with no reference to where the agendas are (you have to scroll all the way to the bottom, and it uses very useless and frustrating double scroll bars instead of direct links to the meetings.)
There is also NO livestream on the main page (something I suggested they do). Citylink should just be constantly streaming at the top of the page when you open up the site, or at least a quick link to it. As you can see, it is NOT working at all (once you find the page, which took me multiple searches). Some have said that I should give a few more weeks while they tweak it, but I am sorry, they should NOT have launched a site that is NOT working yet.
The search engine is almost non-functioning. I did 10 different searches for common public documents and got ZERO results.
Like I said above, I am not surprised the website turned out like this, they are just making things harder for citizens to access our government, and this website is a shining example of their lack of transparency and open government.
City websites should not be a graphic show pony, it should be a functioning, searchable site with access to vids, agendas and most importantly DATA!
It amazes me that the mayor, who ran a web development company would except this new format as a success. Just more of our money in a burn barrel.