So, I  find it horribly amusing that an the official Owosso Michigan home page hired a Canadian marketing firm to design and build their website. I’m also horribly amused by the fact that they didn’t build iin spam protection! The site appears to have gone live fairly recently, and when I first visited they had no spam, and now they have 3 spam articles at the very top of their page.

What I Like!

I’m all for making central hubs of information based upon a location. Owosso.com Looks like it will be great for finding up to date news, as well as pulling in information, and maybe even advertising my services. The facebook page is cool because it lets people from Owosso sort of socialize. That’s neat, I dig!

What I don’t Like

But please, make it worth our while! Don’t make me afraid to visit your site because you have links to a Phishing site. Akismet much? Seriously! It’s the least you should do.

I plan on keeping close tabs on the site, I’ll even spread the word. I think Owosso has great potential as a community and I’d absolutely love to see this grow and be utilized.

What I want!

To sum it up, here’s a few things I’d like to see:

Better Business Search!

I searched for “High Speed Internet” and all I got was B&B Internet Yellow Pages and the Owosso High School! Come on! Admittedly, Google Location Search didn’t fare much better. A change of API may be in order, as well as a marketing blitz directed at businesses. Talk it up! Be unabashed that “Owosso.com is the number one location people visit for information about Owosso!” Give out window clings! Bring a laptop with a Ev-Do Card and set people up right at location. Get the word out!

A Better Design

OK, I love free wordpress themes, and guess what? They’re using a free Wordpress Theme. It’s cool. The Internet is all about getting more people involved in the things that matter to them. It’s way more important that you focus on the architecture of your site than the aesthetic design, which is why free wordpress themes rock. The problem is the theme is poorly configured. Smashing Magazine recently had a post titled When To Use Magazine-Style Themes. People behind Owosso.com, READ THAT! I’m not your typical web user.  I’m passionate about this kind of thing, it’s stuff I care about. Using the web as medium for interaction with your local environment is the kind of thing that makes me stay up till 2AM typing blog posts! I craved this site,  and I got frusterated by it.

Fix the Layout!

Apply some information architecture. What do people want to see? Do they want to see a bunch of links pimping other sites quasi related, like the argust press home page, or the shiawassee chamber of commerce? Or would they rather actually find out what your site has to offer? I spent 15 minutes browsing the site and barely found the real estate section. New Visitors spend < 3 minutes on a site generally. If they haven’t figured out what they want to do in < 30 secondss, they’re gone. Period. This is why information architecture is so important! Another tiny detail… if I am in Owosso, I don’t need to see the weather. I can just look outside. It doesn’t need to be so prominent on the page.

Anyway, it’s late. I should hit the hay. A huge shout out to the people in Owosso who made this happen, this is huge (even if I am being picky). This could very easily be used to synchronize the community. Awesome!

Tags: Akismet, Business Search, Information Architecture, Location Services, Owosso, Owosso.com, Spam

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Applications and Services, Other Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.