You are here

What Must The National Park Service Do To Improve Its Web Presence?

Share
Alternate Text
Bummer. 

The Internet is the currency of the media world these days, with smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops tied into it to get the latest news and information. While the National Park Service is promoting its social media tools, and has greatly improved its websites in recent months, there still are some weak links.

A good example of this need surfaced just the other day, when it was announced that "Tuskegee Institute NHS, Tuskegee Airmen NHS and Selma to Montgomery NHT are extending their reach by using mobile tagging with interactive quick response (QR) codes. Park websites can now be accessed anywhere via mobile devices with a simple scan."

While QR codes provide a quick, easy way to link your smartphone to a specific website, the websites need to be prepared for that traffic. In general, the three sites mentioned above cover the bases in terms of providing visitor information, but there are gaps, and some shortfalls. One disappointing aspect common to not just these three sites but to all NPS sites is the "Schedule of Events" search feature. If a park doesn't populate its calendar, no results are returned. So if you search for events at Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail between January 5 and the end of March, you'll find there are absolutely no events. Is that truly the case, or hasn't the park staff gotten around to loading that information?

Gettysburg National Military Park's web gurus seem to have realized the frustrating aspect of the event scheduler, and below it places links to upcoming events.

Constant monitoring also is needed to see that a park's "News" section is updated with the most recent release. Visit Selma to Montgomery's website and you'll find that no news releases have been posted since last March 27. Has no other newsworthy item surfaced since then?

Now, there are some very good websites in the National Park System universe. Yellowstone National Park's website overflows with information, so much so that it takes quite a while to digest, and problems arise because it can seem like you're traveling through a maze. If you don't have a well-designed site and an up-to-date Site Map, discovering just what is available for you can be a hit-and-miss proposition.

And sometimes even with a Site Map, 503 errors -- "We're sorry but the page you requested can't be served at this time." -- crop up. Another curiosity about Yellowstone's website (and maybe other nps.gov sites, too) is what happens when you click on the "Website Policies" link. You get a blank page. 

But the Yellowstone webmeisters overall do a pretty great job with their pages. Click on the "Plan Your Visit" link on the home page and after a quick, descriptive paragraph of what awaits you in the park they offer a paragraph riddled with hot links to topics such as "things to do," "places to eat," "fees, reservations and permits," "accessibility" and, being seasonally correct, "Visiting in Winter."

Sadly, though, the link to "brochures" was out of operation when I checked Friday. It was back in service Saturday, and the list of available publications was robust, from fire science, bison ecology, and birding reports as well as backcountry planners and historical information. Isle Royale National Park's link to brochures is not as flashy in layout, but still offers a relatively rich selection of topics, from camping and boating to invasive species, fishing regs and the park newspaper.

Most of the big parks -- Yellowstone, Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountain -- have content-rich sites that, in general, are easy to explore. Maintenance will take some pages down occasionally -- no doubt the situation with Yellowstone's brochures page -- and that should be expected with the amount of traffic these sites bear.

Still, a general criticism of park websites is they're inconsistent. While some park sites list a page "For Kids" that provides information on Junior Ranger programs, other park sites don't. Some parks view their site's home page as a tourism billboard, and rightly so. Go to Cape Hatteras National Seashore's home page and you'll see links to Directions, Operating Hours & Seasons, Fees and Reservations, Program Schedule, Park Newspaper, and Events, Ocean Swimming Safety, Off-Road Vehicle Use, Climbing the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and Bodie Island Lighthouse Tours. But there's nothing on camping, a topic that is deeper inside the site, taking three clicks to reach.

Smaller (in size) park units, and large (in size) units that experience relatively little visitation both suffer from a lack of web maintenance, something that could be tied directly to a lack of staff and funding. For instance, if you wanted this past weekend to tour Gates of Arctic National Park and Preserve's photo gallery to go "on a virtual expedition through the vast, expansive, natural beauty of the Brooks Range," you were rewarded with, "Unable to connect to the CommonSpot SITES data source 'commonspot-sites'. Please verify that this is a valid ColdFusion data source."

Curious about the best birding to be found at Essex National Heritage Area in Massachusetts? A bad link takes you to Page not found.

Alternate Text
Whoops!

Interested in camping somewhere in the Delaware and Leigh National Heritage Corridor in Pennsylvania? Click on the "Outdoor Activites" link and you're sent to a page that says, "A wide range of lodging and camping opportunities are available within the Corridor, from a gilded age bed and breakfast to primitive camping opportunities." Period. Where you might find those facilities is a mystery.

Some websites can seem a bit mysterious when you reach their homepage. Delaware and Leigh National Heritage Corridor's, for instance, greets you with two links in the left-hand column: Park Home and Plan Your Visit. Click on Park Home and you're taken...to the page you're on. Click on Plan Your Visit and the possibilities open up a bit, with links for directions to the park, operating hours, fees, accessbility, things to do, and things to know before you come...a link that leads to bare bones pages, one on weather that states: We have four seasons and the temperature varies 10 degrees from one end of the Corridor to the other on any given day. The winters are harsher in the two mountainous northern counties (Luzerne and Carbon) than in the southern-most county (Bucks).

No doubt, staffing and funding constraints surely are behind the inconsistencies and shortfalls of nps.gov websites. But here in the 21st century, where information can/should be a click or two away on the Internet, the Park Service needs to not just strive for consistency and delivery, but ensure it.

For starters, it should require that every park's homepage contain links for the basics: Plan Your Visit, Photos & Multimedia, History & Culture, Nature & Science, For Teachers, For Kids, News, and Management. And those pages should have information on them and content that is updated regularly.

If need be, park managers, give your social media staffers a break from Twitter and Instagram and have them spend some time on website content. The rest of us will appreciate it so much more.

Comments

By the way - an interesting entry in today's Morning Report about a catastrophic incident in the NPS data center.


Kurt, thanks for the reply. I think you are right about there not being the staff at parks to produce in depth complicated websites. What I'm talking about is just handling simple things like basic factual information such as having correct opening and closing hours and fees etc. Parks are busy in the summers but most sites I've worked at are almost always slow in the mornings. Checking that that basic information is correct should be a daily ritual for visitor services staff like turning on the lights, counting the money and unlocking the doors.

I am not even sure we should be in the business of producing complex websites. It seems to me that the NPS's focus when it comes to websites should be to give people the information they need to visit the site and see whatever it is for themselves first hand. I would say given the resources available the focus should be on keeping the sites streamline and simple.

My point about the store operations in many parks is that they have expanded from being there to support the mission of the park to being there to bring income into the park. It has gotten to the point that much of the merchandise at some parks has only the most tenuous connection to the resource itself. I've seen time after time where we've succeed in getting people to the park, they come in eager to engage with the resource, and then get sidetracked into shopping! If you ask me I think our parks should give us a break from consumerism. And I think if we are going to have that kind of stuff it shouldn't be easier to find than an NPS ranger that can interact with the visitor.

I'm thinking of a park that has much of the visitor experience centered around an audio tour of the park. The public has to stop in at a park VC to pick this up and receive a free permit to enter the site. That audio tour could be made an MP3 file for people to get the night before and bypass the VC or at least the park could offer a place for the public in the VC to plug in and download it but I am sure one concern they would have about doing this is loss of foot traffic on the sales floor.


Ron et al,

I do believe outsourcing web content duties could save the NPS money (that could be better spent on the ground) and produce a better across-the-board product, simply by tasking a group solely with that duty.

Can a central office in the NPS handle the task? That's a question worth exploring, but frankly the agency is pulled in some many directions by projects, politics, and funding issues that it could be difficult to do. Obviously they're not doing it now, and in the past year they roled out a new website template that isn't consistent across the system in terms of basic content.

I also don't see it as a toss to the private sector. Sadly, agencies like the NPS can't always be everything, and webmeisters and communnications is one thing many parks struggle at.

As for campgrounds, I frankly would prefer to see them back in the purview of the NPS. Back to the days of having rangers roaming the campgrounds for instant interpretive chats.


Thanks Rick B.

Sounds like a mega-incident from a power outage at a bad time (New Years Day) and likely explains the problems accessing various NPS websites in recent days.


Some really good comments above. They pretty well cover anything I could say, except for one point.

Perhaps those of us who spend time commenting, complaining or suggesting on Traveler need to remember that none of that will really do anything other than make us feel good or frustrated, whichever the case may be.

But what might happen if we were to take a few moments to go to a specific park's website, find the "contact us" button and make a suggestion directly to park staff via email? Could it be that oft times they simply may not be seeing shortcomings in their site because they seldom receive public feedback?

My pet peeve is the frustration I've experienced several times when I've tried to reserve a campsite and can't tell whether no sites are available because all are already reserved or the campsite is first-come. I've tried to take that beef to recreation.gov and reserveamerica.com without success. I'm going to try it with some emails directly to the parks. Perhaps, if they know some of us perceive it to be a problem, they might be able to simply post a note under "Plan Your Visit - Camping" that says something like "Campsites may be reserved through Recreation.gov from April through October" or "All campsites are first come first served. No reservations are taken."

I kinda think they might welcome our help.


Lee, I am sure NPS'ers are fully aware of and occasionally monitor commentary on National Parks Traveler. Nevertheless, your suggestion has a lot of merit. Take the time to read and review specific nps.gov web sites for specific NPS units and offer written suggestions for improvement. Actually, monitoring of park websites also should be part of the duties of park staff, but with budget cuts and vacancies, etc., I doubt that frequent monitoring and auditing of park websites gets a high management priority, either by park administration or by staff working in regional offices. However, the internet has become a wonderful tool for NPS public outreach. Look at what Steve Bumgardner and Yosemite have accomplished with wide-spread internet distribution of the highly professional video Yosemite Nature Note clips.


I'm not an anti-capitalist, just an anti-greed

Ah, but I suspect you define them the same. Aren't all capitalist "greedy"? If not, I would love to know where the line is drawn.


And I suspect you have no idea either what my opinion is OR where the line is drawn. I was trying to make nice earler with a point we sorta agreed on. Don't mess it up.


Add comment

CAPTCHA

This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.

The Essential RVing Guide

The Essential RVing Guide to the National Parks

The National Parks RVing Guide, aka the Essential RVing Guide To The National Parks, is the definitive guide for RVers seeking information on campgrounds in the National Park System where they can park their rigs. It's available for free for both iPhones and Android models.

This app is packed with RVing specific details on more than 250 campgrounds in more than 70 parks.

You'll also find stories about RVing in the parks, some tips if you've just recently turned into an RVer, and some planning suggestions. A bonus that wasn't in the previous eBook or PDF versions of this guide are feeds of Traveler content: you'll find our latest stories as well as our most recent podcasts just a click away.

So whether you have an iPhone or an Android, download this app and start exploring the campgrounds in the National Park System where you can park your rig.