please empty your brain below
i) Sites that return either nothing or absurd results for your search but don't tell you that is because you don't have cookies enabled for their site (and I would argue cookies disabled ought to be the default on any reasonably secure computer).
ii) Sites that are broken or have errors but no means of contacting the webmaster to inform them of the problem. Some just ignore your emails, others apologise but are unable to do anything about and some actually thank you for pointing it out and correct it.
a) fucking horrible
b) bloody complex
and if it's been left in the hands of people who don't know what they're supposed to be doing, or who don't really care, then the data entry is going to be crap.
But you're right, it still sucks!
But, and not disagreeing with Lyle here (I think), designing the front end to be user friendly is surely one of the key points? When I used to design (admitedly much more basic) data input interfaces I always started with the belief that the user had never used such an interface before and made sure that all useful data had to be entered. Thus, ask all the questions with a yes
o answer if necessary.... that way every event has to think whether it is wheelchair/hearing loop/whatever friendly. Yes
o to every option.
Absolutely disgraceful. I just hope someone is noticing!
One conclusion you might draw from the state of the data on VisitLondon.com is that nobody cares about it.
If there was a decent analytics/reporting system on visitlondon its operators would know that people were searching for and finding certain types of event, such as accessible events. The lack of such events in the reports would be obvious. Maybe there are no such reports, so the site is just assuming that it is serving a needy audience rather than *knowing*. The lack of audience communication extends to being unable to flag an event as "cancelled", at least get the users of the site to do a bit of work if you can't be bothered to do it in house!
DG, you've done London a service (again) for spotting this and I've a feeling we have not heard the last of it. You're right in implying that the number of events that VisitLondon.com tracks could be managed on a well structured static HTML website, but a proper database driven site could do so much more. Might be interesting to see what one of the 70 staff has to say on the subject.
In the interests of disclosure, I work for a company that runs a reasonably high traffic free classifieds website. We don't have an Events section ...yet!
(apart from the bicycle thing, but I'm willing to forgive that.)
HOWEVER. It would appear that the quality of information on the DG database is also suspect. Switched On London has fused.
Very interesting indeed.
Maybe people would just be better advised to buy a copy of Time Out (London).
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