The City of Prince George has unveiled a brand new website with loads of interesting features. At first, it caused all sorts of excitement on individual citizens as its advanced design was much easier to navigate and find information they wanted to begin with and go happily onto their next destination online, perhaps deeper onsite! Much better than the old clunky website with broken links, old outdated code heading in many directions, orphaned pages randomly doubled in the thousands of linked “internal” pages that site had beyond the ones the public saw from the home and main page alone. It’s apparently much easier on the civic staff working on their website, as well as winning lots of popularity from residents and visitors looking for information about our Northern Capitol. Among that new information on the Prince George’s website, they had developed an “App” for your cell phone (*it’s inclusively available for both Android and IPhone) and it became very simple to find just type “Prince George app” in the search field on the top right of the city’s homepage! If my link to the app itself becomes broken in the future, please use the link to the home page and search when that happens, I’ll update this as soon as I notice it myself.
Screenshot from an Android, CPG App 2017
So, what exactly can you do with this app? If you ever spend any time walking or rolling around on a mobility device in Prince George, even when you drive through our city in a conventional vehicle, public transportation, taxi or HandyDART, you see areas the city services could do work on. This I am sure of, as we are the eyes the city needs to have to show them exactly where we see the problems. Historically, we would contact the city through Email (servicecentre@princegeorge.ca) phone (250-561-7600) or by walking in and letting the desk clerk know that a problem exists(1100 Patricia Blvd in Prince George) in not as quite as good detail I just did with the Google link… It was highly inefficient and frustrating to city crews and citizens alike. The reports and work were often delayed trying to find something reported a few years ago which may or may not exist in the location detailed or another complaint could have fixed it already a while back under another work order. The app now allows you to submit a photo or video with a report and upload it directly to the City’s service department referencing a diverse number of alert types and priorities needed to address appropriate crews directly to the problem, multiple complaints of same exact area now have a like tracking number. it also gives the app user that tracking number to check progress of the individual report. The app goes above and beyond being just a reporting tool. Anything happening in the city including Services, Operations, Bylaws, Enforcement, all weather operations (sweeping, snow removal), Parks, everything can be found on the App! Download it today from the city’s website to get all the details!
Professional designers don’t use capitols and spaces in URL’s,just saying…
The princegeorge.ca website is rampant with them. It’s easy to miss in a hurry to meet deadlines, I know. You should have hired me as a code proofreader but there is always time to do over I always find. As long as you include those redirect links to warn us when you do. I expect a redesign of some filenames will occur as time progresses. Good job other than that, city design crew. I’m still looking to reset some links and renew a connection or two on multiple websites I advise on (<–capitols in URL I know…) and manage! Over the decades since the last City Website update, hundreds of external websites and thousands of social media shares had linked to the city’s original website URL and individual pages which were different than the one’s presently being used and rapidly showed broken on all our connected sites. Meh, natch, we independently remotely linked external designers had to go to work and fix, really fast. But, civic designers never did set up a redirect link on the original webpages showing that connection of an external page linking and leave those pages up with a visible reminder to update links by a certain date. Many designers working for highly paid contractors will do that on those independent websites so we don’t loose customers and stakeholders for our employers in a shuffle of domain names. It can be a nightmare to those connected websites to ours when it isn’t. A million designers sipping coffee at 6am local time, waking to perhaps hundreds of broken links from Prince George on the first day of launch. The search took a bit of time to find connected information to relink as it wasn’t set up properly. That didn’t take long to get the search working on “princegeorge.ca”, but lots of links takes appropriately long times to fix. We needed to find the new links and replace them manually on our sites that we we manage, and we had to get that done fast as possible. Broken links hurt our Search Engine Optimization status which affects the connected website in a negative, sometimes expensive way. Does not take much to negatively affect a website or blog’s credibility to many visitors who visit once find that link broken and never return to our pages. Thank you for all you do and will do!