On 8 December 2008, Doe’s Directory passed the 300,000 visitor mark. Barry Doe (website i www.barrydoe.plus.com) states he now receives 1,000 visitors a week. This may be puny compared to operators’ own sites and Traveline but for an independently run enterprise, that’s quite reasonable.
I would imagine that the main users of Doe’s site are those wishing to visit an unfamiliar area and who may need a hard information. It proves even in the modern era of instant downloads from across the globe that print isn’t quite dead yet.
The number of die-hard 12-hour clock publishers regularly reported by Doe remains constant. Using Doe’s information, we last commented on this in April. It would appear from Doe’s site that recent 12-hour convert Eastbourne Buses has reverted back to 24-hours though this isn’t actually true. Matters will no doubt change when Stagecoach takes over. One of only two local authorities producing 12-hour clock publicity currently hasn't a timetable available.
Doe continues his love affair with the PDF. All but Doe’s front page continues in this Adobe Acrobat format. His must be one of very few 100 per cent Adobe sites. I confess I am no fan of PDFs and this is my main beef about his site. Accepting that PDFs are now quicker to load than they once were, they’re still slower than HTML and they can (and do) cause crashes, system slowdowns and Adobe failures. Just see the genuine images for proof of that. Swapping between browser tabs can be sluggish when a PDF is open.
The major benefit of a PDF is its printability but even here, we wonder who would regularly wish to print Doe’s pages that are potentially upgraded as often as 500 time a year. And after all, Doe's pages are just lists. PDFs are of greater benefit when printing a proper timetable.
Perhaps one of Doe’s sponsors should redesign his site to bring it up to Web 2.0, with a content management system. A CMS would enable easy upgrades without altering the site's structure or design. That would certainly solve the issue.
In spite of those sometimes irritating PDFs, Doe's online directory is still a useful resource.
3 comments:
... because changing and printing low tech HTML pages is a massive challenge.
To some degree i would agree with Anonymous' comment - though 'massive' challenge might be overstating the point.
Certainly it is possible for anyone with a conventional word processing system to produce PDF files, and that includes the free ones like Open Office. Producing HTML pages will require more effort and/or special software for the purpose, which may need to be purchased. However, it should be pointed out that some word processing systems can also produce HTML pages, but this is not always good HTML!
Printing is really a separate issue - and it would be reasonable for a website owner to provide a PDF version of a page that users might want to print out (notwithstanding that some browsers, e.g. Safari, have a facility to save a web page as a PDF file, which also answers that need).
However, to my mind the website owner/developer should consider the requirements of his users, not just his own convenience - and therefore take the trouble to learn the best practices, or employ somebody else who knows those techniques. After all, for whose benefit is a website?
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