Zoo Atlanta: Fix your site (in a number of ways)

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.