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What Must The National Park Service Do To Improve Its Web Presence?

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Bummer. 

The Internet is the currency of the media world these days, with smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops tied into it to get the latest news and information. While the National Park Service is promoting its social media tools, and has greatly improved its websites in recent months, there still are some weak links.

A good example of this need surfaced just the other day, when it was announced that "Tuskegee Institute NHS, Tuskegee Airmen NHS and Selma to Montgomery NHT are extending their reach by using mobile tagging with interactive quick response (QR) codes. Park websites can now be accessed anywhere via mobile devices with a simple scan."

While QR codes provide a quick, easy way to link your smartphone to a specific website, the websites need to be prepared for that traffic. In general, the three sites mentioned above cover the bases in terms of providing visitor information, but there are gaps, and some shortfalls. One disappointing aspect common to not just these three sites but to all NPS sites is the "Schedule of Events" search feature. If a park doesn't populate its calendar, no results are returned. So if you search for events at Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail between January 5 and the end of March, you'll find there are absolutely no events. Is that truly the case, or hasn't the park staff gotten around to loading that information?

Gettysburg National Military Park's web gurus seem to have realized the frustrating aspect of the event scheduler, and below it places links to upcoming events.

Constant monitoring also is needed to see that a park's "News" section is updated with the most recent release. Visit Selma to Montgomery's website and you'll find that no news releases have been posted since last March 27. Has no other newsworthy item surfaced since then?

Now, there are some very good websites in the National Park System universe. Yellowstone National Park's website overflows with information, so much so that it takes quite a while to digest, and problems arise because it can seem like you're traveling through a maze. If you don't have a well-designed site and an up-to-date Site Map, discovering just what is available for you can be a hit-and-miss proposition.

And sometimes even with a Site Map, 503 errors -- "We're sorry but the page you requested can't be served at this time." -- crop up. Another curiosity about Yellowstone's website (and maybe other nps.gov sites, too) is what happens when you click on the "Website Policies" link. You get a blank page. 

But the Yellowstone webmeisters overall do a pretty great job with their pages. Click on the "Plan Your Visit" link on the home page and after a quick, descriptive paragraph of what awaits you in the park they offer a paragraph riddled with hot links to topics such as "things to do," "places to eat," "fees, reservations and permits," "accessibility" and, being seasonally correct, "Visiting in Winter."

Sadly, though, the link to "brochures" was out of operation when I checked Friday. It was back in service Saturday, and the list of available publications was robust, from fire science, bison ecology, and birding reports as well as backcountry planners and historical information. Isle Royale National Park's link to brochures is not as flashy in layout, but still offers a relatively rich selection of topics, from camping and boating to invasive species, fishing regs and the park newspaper.

Most of the big parks -- Yellowstone, Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountain -- have content-rich sites that, in general, are easy to explore. Maintenance will take some pages down occasionally -- no doubt the situation with Yellowstone's brochures page -- and that should be expected with the amount of traffic these sites bear.

Still, a general criticism of park websites is they're inconsistent. While some park sites list a page "For Kids" that provides information on Junior Ranger programs, other park sites don't. Some parks view their site's home page as a tourism billboard, and rightly so. Go to Cape Hatteras National Seashore's home page and you'll see links to Directions, Operating Hours & Seasons, Fees and Reservations, Program Schedule, Park Newspaper, and Events, Ocean Swimming Safety, Off-Road Vehicle Use, Climbing the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and Bodie Island Lighthouse Tours. But there's nothing on camping, a topic that is deeper inside the site, taking three clicks to reach.

Smaller (in size) park units, and large (in size) units that experience relatively little visitation both suffer from a lack of web maintenance, something that could be tied directly to a lack of staff and funding. For instance, if you wanted this past weekend to tour Gates of Arctic National Park and Preserve's photo gallery to go "on a virtual expedition through the vast, expansive, natural beauty of the Brooks Range," you were rewarded with, "Unable to connect to the CommonSpot SITES data source 'commonspot-sites'. Please verify that this is a valid ColdFusion data source."

Curious about the best birding to be found at Essex National Heritage Area in Massachusetts? A bad link takes you to Page not found.

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Whoops!

Interested in camping somewhere in the Delaware and Leigh National Heritage Corridor in Pennsylvania? Click on the "Outdoor Activites" link and you're sent to a page that says, "A wide range of lodging and camping opportunities are available within the Corridor, from a gilded age bed and breakfast to primitive camping opportunities." Period. Where you might find those facilities is a mystery.

Some websites can seem a bit mysterious when you reach their homepage. Delaware and Leigh National Heritage Corridor's, for instance, greets you with two links in the left-hand column: Park Home and Plan Your Visit. Click on Park Home and you're taken...to the page you're on. Click on Plan Your Visit and the possibilities open up a bit, with links for directions to the park, operating hours, fees, accessbility, things to do, and things to know before you come...a link that leads to bare bones pages, one on weather that states: We have four seasons and the temperature varies 10 degrees from one end of the Corridor to the other on any given day. The winters are harsher in the two mountainous northern counties (Luzerne and Carbon) than in the southern-most county (Bucks).

No doubt, staffing and funding constraints surely are behind the inconsistencies and shortfalls of nps.gov websites. But here in the 21st century, where information can/should be a click or two away on the Internet, the Park Service needs to not just strive for consistency and delivery, but ensure it.

For starters, it should require that every park's homepage contain links for the basics: Plan Your Visit, Photos & Multimedia, History & Culture, Nature & Science, For Teachers, For Kids, News, and Management. And those pages should have information on them and content that is updated regularly.

If need be, park managers, give your social media staffers a break from Twitter and Instagram and have them spend some time on website content. The rest of us will appreciate it so much more.

Comments

There have been some good suggestions, but despite the scoffers at the "lack of staff and money angle," anyone who has tried to maintain or expand a website knows that they require regular care and feeding – and learning the necessary skills takes time. I don't know anything about the interface behind nps.gov and how easy (or difficult) it is to use, but my experience with a couple of widely used commercial web systems confirms they can consume a lot of hours—and be very frustrating at times.

Good web content doesn't just fall out of the sky. Someone has to research the information, verify if it's still current, write the text, shoot the video or photos, and format it all to meet the specific requirement of the web interface—and that's before you try to get it to upload without any hitches. Converting content to a format friendly for mobile devices is a great idea...but it's not quick and it's not free.

Larger parks such as Yellowstone may be able to dedicate more staff time to their website than smaller areas, and during the "off-season," which varies from park to park, there's almost always some staff time in any park that could be spent on website work. During peak season, it's often a different situation altogether, and I can say from personal experience in a small park that the time and staff to spend updating a website is a rare commodity for at least half the year.

We see a fair bit of complaining, some of it warranted, about too much NPS money and staffing being diverted from the field to "headquarters overhead," whether it be at the Washington, regional or park level. Maintaining and improving a website falls into that category, and dollars and staff time spent on that work isn't available for other needs, whether it be face-to-face visitor services or trail maintenance. Yes, it's about setting priorities, and on-line services are increasingly important to park visitors ... but we can't have it both ways.


Perpetual Seasonal, I'm going to go out on a limb and disagree with you. I don't think it's a lack of will that's behind the website problems, but a lack of staff. You look at the bigger parks, the Yosemites, Yellowstones and Grand Canyons to name three, and their websites are very rich in content. The smaller sites struggle to keep up.

Here's what one superintendent told me:

"...how is a park like XXXX, with so few staff and a lot fewer than we had before, to really keep up on this? I absolutely agree that it's critical but we've never been able to hire anyone with the right skills so it's all added onto what folks are already doing. It's a real challenge. Give me a fraction of YELL's resources and I could do a hell of a lot more..."

And the staffing problem goes beyond web gurus. In many parks, the chief of interpretation often is also tasked with being the public affairs officer...and not only don't they always have the time to handle that job properly, but they don't always come with the skill set. That's not to say they don't work hard at it, but it's not always their top priority.

I would say the same for visitor centers. I have found some very fine ones in Yellowstone (Old Faithful), Zion (Springdale), Capital Reef (Fruita), Olympic (Port Angeles), Cape Cod (Salt Pond), and Cape Hatteras (Ocracoke). Not sure what your point is about the materials for sale in the VCs, but, again, park staffing levels make it impossible for park staff to generate much more than brochures. That's why the cooperating associations are so valuable.

Todd, some park web sites do list the information re visitor center seasons, hours and locations, but not the GPS coordinates. One problem with finding this information, though, is that there's a lack of consistency as to where it is on the site.


While I am a big advocate for local Park control, this issue is screaming out for "outsourcing". The fact ( if it is fact) that each unit is responsible for the creation of its own website is absurdly redundant. There should be a standardized template to which the individual park data, where appropriate, can be added with a minimal amount of effort.


EC has a point. The NPS clearly does not have the staff or funding across the board to handle this aspect of providing the public with information, which is a very key -- or should be -- part of its job.

There are more than a few companies out there today that could provide this service (heck, the Traveler might even be interested in taking it on!), and there should be budget savings to be realized.

Coming up with a standardized template shouldn't be difficult, and keeping it populated with relevant and pertinent information wouldn't be terribly difficult, either. Where the NPS seems to be falling down is the vast staffing and funding disparities between parks. If the agency can outsource the operations of its campgrounds, outsourcing web content generation can be done.


Kurt,

Let me make one clarification before a few of the anti-capitalist go ballistic. When I say "outsourcing" it doesn't necessarily have to be a non-governmental entity (although I am sure you would do a great job). Just having someone at the national level within the NPS would accomplish the goal.


Traveler, your point is well taken. There are governmental/private sector contracts that are very successful. This concept of partnership with mutual cooperation and respect is an important one. However, I do not think it is the answer to adequete funding for our National Parks or other governmental agencies. For these contracts to be productive for everyone involved, the agencies need the staff to oversee the contracts to insure standards are met, agency policies are being adhered to, etc.

Campgrounds is a good example. Due to increasing shortfalls in agency budgets, campgrounds are either being contracted out and/or being run by retired couples (many of whom are just excellent), interns or VIPs. It is my own experience that many of the contract employees are poorly paid with no benefits. The same applies to the interns/VIPs. They receive little or no support or supervision (no funding for it), and are performing duties that exceed their authority or clearly should be done by paid agency personnel, at least from my perspective. I see this quite often when posting fire information updates in campgrounds during the summer season.


Some interesting ideas worthy of consideration by the NPS. Having people with expertise in website development and maintenance is essential if those sites are to be of the quality expected by the public these days.

The issue of funding "centralized" web gurus at the expense of field operations will continue to be difficult. I suspect we also tend to seriously underestimate the volume of work required to keep more than 400 individual websites current; this will require a lot more than a single "someone at the national level."

"Centralizing" website updating also has some downsides, including duplication of effort. Whether they're NPS employees or even contractors, individuals located outside a park simply won't be aware of the myriad of details about a park necessary for quality content; employees at the local level would still have to provide the nuts and bolts information for a park's website and feed updates on upcoming events, current road and trail closures, etc. to "website central." In just one example, if facilities are closed in two dozen parks on the same day by a big storm, that information needs to be posted promptly on each individual site.

Perhaps one answer is a combination of more centralized expertise for overall website design and general maintenance while continuing local posting of "breaking news," but the challenge for small parks in particular (example cited above by Kurt) remains.

There are no easy answers on this one.


EC,

I'm not an anti-capitalist, just an anti-greed, and thank you for clarifying. I admit my first thought when you posted was "great - another throw it to the private sector grab", but I agree with your clarification.


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