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NPS Web Sites: Boon or Bust?

Submitted by Kurt Repanshek on February 22, 2007 - 11:00am

If you've been paying attention, the National Park Service somewhat recently revamped its web presence, taking a cookie-cutter approach to its on-line presence to produce a uniform fit, if you will, from park to park to park.
One of the features I like is an effort by some parks to put more photos up on their sites. But if you frequent various parks' web sites, you'll notice there can be quite a bit of difference in the available content.
Seabury Blair Jr., "Mr. Outdoors" for the Kitsap Sun out of Bremerton, Washington, has noticed this difference. And he's not very complimentary of what the NPS has produced. For his views, check out this site.

Comments

Submitted by matt (not verified) on February 22, 2007 - 5:53pm.
Waaaaaaaahhhhh! I'm afraid of change!!! To be honest, if I have to choose between a webnerd updating Olympics website or an LEO out in the field keeping the place safe, I'm going to go with the LEO. Websites should be kept relevant but not every NPS site is going to be like Glacier NP.
Submitted by Gabrielle Sedor (not verified) on February 23, 2007 - 12:41pm.
Agreed, but there was definitely a significant amount of time and resources poured into the NPS web redesign. The fact that the end result makes it more difficult to find park sites by state, region or topic is frustrating to say the least. www.nps.gov used to be a daily destination on my laptop but now I actually rely on my own website and the deep links to the original park websites (those local pages you can sometimes find clicking on the "In Depth" button at nps.gov) that we posted there to find information I need. There are a lot of great websites dedicated to the National Parks, Kurt's being one of the best. But they should be free to supplement and highlight what NPS has to offer, rather than have to fill the gaps left by NPS's poorly planned "updated" site.
Submitted by Random Walker (not verified) on February 23, 2007 - 9:12pm.
I was trying the other day to re access some administrative history on a NP site and could not find it anywhere.. I do remember pages and pages of this kind of data.