Cincinnati-oh.gov: site critique

By Tom Hickerson, COMP150EG

For my site critique, I picked the city of Cincinnati for several reasons, many of which I’ll reveal later in this paper. At first glance, the city’s site is well-designed; many links lead to useful information about living, working, and municipal services in Cincinnati, Ohio. However, site problems crop up early, and we finally concentrate on what is the worst of this site’s misgivings: faulty, inaccurate translations provided through a third-party website.

Initial Site Review: Information, and Lots of It

When you go to http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/, you find a lot of information, professionally laid out for you to search through. In doing this, the city has made their site a resource for a lot of different people, you can find out a lot of information on different subjects, from business-related links to jobs to park and library information. However, looking over the main page and several other pages, we find a few design flaws that annoy the user more than anything else.

• Nice, large margins. The site obviously had to scale its size down for many different types of browsers and screen resolutions, so in a monitor size larger than 800 pixels by 600 pixels, we can see large gray spaces (as indicated above) on both sides of the home page and in succeeding pages.
• Useful graphics are smaller, flashy graphics are accentuated. How big is the picture of the mayor? About 50 pixels by 50 pixels. The city council? Around 50 pixels by 50 pixels. The city manager? Again, 50 by 50. A picture of the city with fireworks? Well, that’s more than 50 by 50. Clicking through to the mayor’s homepage, for example, will get the user a bigger picture, but of course, it’s a bigger version of the one that’s on the main page. Some more useful or instructional pictures, such as the state flag or the city’s seal, would certainly be appreciated.

• Inconsistent alt tags. That picture of the mayor I just mentioned doesn’t have any alt tags. Some others do, some others don’t.

• Lots of margin place holders. Loading the page into Dreamweaver, we find that the site is held together by lots of small, thin images to fill up the empty space. Nothing like graphics to take the place of HTML and CSS…

Click Further, click forever

There are two main flaws to the site, one of which is fatal, but another is simply annoying.

It can be summed up in one question: How many times do you need a link to get a birth/death certificate on your city’s homepage? On Cincinnati’s home page, you can find that same link in three different places. Additionally, when a user clicks on the ‘More…’ link in the above side bar, the user is brought to a page that has the same number and type of links, not more. It often said that design is all about less, not more; the plethora of links and separate static pages was created to boost the idea that there is more information, but the user goes away with the feeling that they might still be looking for something.

The Fatal Flaw: lost in translation

In one of the previous images, there is a small set of links entitled “Translate this site:” with a set of links to different sites. Actually, they all run through http://w4.systranlinks.com/, a site that performs machine translation on English language web pages. The result is usually hideously funny, but in Cincinnati’s case, it is just hideous.

As a Russian speaker, I clicked on the site to provide me with a Russian translation; in the picture above, a Russian site is provided, but with the caption images all still in English. The machine translated ‘Do Business’ as Sdelaite Delo, a half-joking phrase which can be typically interpreted as ‘Do Your Business’. Each sentence contains errors; the phrase for ‘Contact Us’ becomes Svyazhites’ My, which is basically ‘Contact We’. Other words are simply left untranslated; ‘birth/death’ is left in English while the rest of the phrase is in Russian, for example.

Each translation can only be presumed to be this difficult, which means that this site is only serviceable to the English-speaking part of the world that uses the Internet every day. Additionally, since the foreign-language part of the site is run through translation software, it is dynamically generated, and therefore unsearchable (and therefore non-functional) for foreign-language search engines.

In order to presumably save money on translation, the City of Cincinnati is misrepresenting itself by providing a slim excuse for accessibility to non-English speakers, making the site barely functional for a large group of Internet users around the world.

The (missing) reason why I chose this city: Cincinnati-Kharkiv

I originally chose Cincinnati because I lived in Ukraine. Let me back up a second and explain that again. There is an organization call the Sister Cities Organization which promotes exchanges between two cities in the US and abroad. In the case of Cincinnati, there is an exchange between Cincinnati, Ohio and Kharkiv, Ukraine, which has provided for aid and exchange programs over the years. However, if you search for the Ukraine on Cincinnati’s web site, you won’t find it. If you search for Cincinnati Kharkiv on the web, you can find http://www.usukraine.org/cpp/profiles/kharkiv.shtml, a site sponsored by the US Agency for International Development. Cincinnati has no obligation to post it, it would not make the site more functional, but it would make the site more complete, in my opinion.