Flashes of Panic

And, within two days, I am the #1 hit on Google for “medford parking sticker”. (“Medford parking permit” gets a lot of noise from the University, which provides information about permits for parking on its Medford campus.)

Thanks to Google’s cache, I did find a page on the police department site which provides this information, but (a) it provides inaccurate information, saying the fee is $5 when it’s actually $10, and (b) to find it, you need to pick “Administration” (not “Traffic/Parking”) and then “Central Records,” neither of which are intuitive choices. (I sent an email to the site’s contact address noting both of these things, hopefully with a constructive tone.)

It’s tricky, as a site builder, to know how to steer people around your site. In this case, it’s probably worthwhile for the webmaster to consider five or six simple, common questions that people come to the site trying to answer. “How to get a parking permit” is one. “How to pay a parking ticket” (or traffic ticket) is another one I can’t figure out right away, and probably should be able to. (It turns out this happens on the city’s website, which is significantly worse than MPD’s.) There’s no point in making a site like this “sticky,” nor in pushing a lot of information most people aren’t interested in to the front page. And making the whole site easily indexable is key; I shouldn’t be able to grab the top spot in a search that easily.

Technorati Tags: medford, parking, user interface, websites