City of Wichita Shuffles Website
This morning, the City of Wichita caused the biggest upheaval to their website in over four years.
On March 4, 2013, the IT department replaced a twelve year old custom system with Microsoft SharePoint (City Launches New Wichita.Gov Website). Broken promises of easier customer searching and simplified administration were fueled by a $30K federal grant funding the change.
Once again, all web addresses have been rearranged. All previous browser favorites/bookmarks and links from other web sites will now deliver a 404 error. This further confuses residents and others who use the site to conduct business with the City. Because address redirection was not used, this also means popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing will be unable to locate City information for several months. This time, the City's public information department wasn't able to create a press release apology letter before the SharePoint upgrade bug became public.
Since the beginning of the Web, a few careless web-masters have made life unnecessarily difficult for their visitors. In 1998, the inventor of the World Wide Web wrote an essay titled "Cool URIs don't change". It seems the springtime temperatures will be left holding the blame for making our City's site uncool.
