Reading Time: 2 minutes
We go to the Atlanta Zoo quite a bit — I’d say 8-10 times/year. We have a season pass so that makes it quite affordable, and the girls have a good time.
I recently got a new GPS, so I thought I’d plug the zoo address in there. I fired up my iPhone, typed in their URL and got this:
Ahh, so pretty. 100% flash. Done. I ended up just waiting for the Garmin to find it though it’s POI database (sloooow, but effective).
The sad thing is, the site isn’t
100% flash. They’ve just got some weird flash-detect script that means that the Flash-less among us (like iPhones) are DOA. Stupid.
They’ve got a few other problems as well:
- Zoo News, which lists a variety of zoo-related news items, doesn’t have an RSS feed? Why not? If I came to the site and cared enough to click on the news, I might actually want to keep up with it. Why not let me? Heck, just make it a blog and you’ll get many more benefits as well (ping new entries, etc). Also, “Zoo News” isn’t clickable from the home page. Weird.
- The Panda Cam page, arguably the only useful page after directions, hours and cost, “will go dark at 5 p.m. on December 31, 2008“. Hurry!
- “Best viewed with Internet Explorer at 1024×768, Windows 2000+, Mac OSX, Flash 6 or above”. Where was I that I saw a bunch of sites with instructions like that? Oh yeah, 1998.
- The “Press Room” link at the top of the site is broken when clicked from a variety of pages (“Calendar”, “Careers”, etc).
- The site doesn’t canonicalize properly (force www or non-www into the URL). Most small sites don’t, but it’s just kinda sloppy.
Don’t get me wrong — the zoo is great. We had a wonderful time there today. Too bad their site is such a mess.
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