As we reported yesterday, the new City of Vancouver website is now live. OpenFile has noted that the $3M CoV website is not mobile friendly. In a separate article, OpenFile asks if the New Vancouver website has new neighbourhood names? While it was interesting to see how the city has lumped Coal Harbour into the West End in their new area designation map (technically Coal Harbour is part of the Downtown), this interactive map at the bottom of the new website is not near our highest priority concern. Rather, our key question is how much information has been lost from the switching over to a new website? To achieve a new look it would have been possible to update the graphics on the front page of the website and in the headers and layout, while retaining all of the existing links and content. Instead the new website did not go this practical route; but rather a new organizational structure was created that rendered many existing bookmarks and existing content inaccessible.
The meeting schedule and agendas for the Development Permit Board Advisory Panel and the Urban Design Panel are not currently available on the new website. The old website snapshot of the DPB showed meetings for August 13, 27 without set agenda items, while the old website showed UDP meetings for August 15 & 29. The amount of information available for these panels is much sparser than before (see screenshots at end). Is there much of a point in simplifying the city’s website so that it essentially doesn’t provide adequate information? How much key information has been lost in the transition?
In our article from yesterday we noted that many of the community profiles and visions are no longer accessible in the new website. This information may still be found on the unofficial link http://former.vancouver.ca for now.
Anyone who feels the urge to file a Freedom of Information Request on how the new website contract was awarded can find the relevant contact information here as the FOI department link is fortunately accessible.
Below are a couple of screenshots comparing the previous Development Permit Board webpage and the new webpage:
They have also failed to bring across the Interested Citizens page that gives biographies of early Vancouverites. This used to be accessible via the Mountain View cemetery page. When asked, I am told, the City said that no-one is interested in history, people just want to know when their garbage is to be picked up. Bureaucrats as Philistines!
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The entire storied history and work of CityPlan is completely gone, as are all community pages from an era from 1995 to 2010 when nine communities of Vancouver covering the majority of the city were directly involved in writing and then implementing their community plan, down to the detail of where traffic circles would be built and water fountains installed. This process had the greatest impact on the livability of Vancouver since the introduction of the street car over 100 years ago. Just like the street car, our glorious past has been paved over.
Vancouver is rapidly sliding down the ranks of livable cities, and such ignorance and rejection of the past is the primary reason.