Richmond's Website a Mess?

Local activist Rick Tatnall has a piece in this week's Style Weekly about the sad state of the City of Richmond's website. This is a follow-up to a March SW article that reported on how outdated some of the city's online information was.

It's not quite as bad as Tatnall makes it out to be. If you go to the city's homepage, there is actually a ton of new and updated information. For every example that Tatnall gives of a Human Services site stuck in 2010, you can find a complete list of 2014 events at the 17th Street Farmer's Market.

The City's continual response is that individual departments handle updating their own info. As a relatively overworked college professor who is responsible for my own department's webpages, I can tell you how hard it can be to find time to add updates. (My college is currently going through a major web overhaul, partially because we had so much outdated information.)

Still, Tatnall's overall point is true: the city has a responsibility to do better. More importantly, the website updates give a clue to administration priorities. How important to the Mayor is his anti-poverty commission if the website for it was last updated in 2012?