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top 49 "best" Park and Rec Municipal Websites (with Details and Scoring)

Fri, 07/31/2009 - 20:45 — spiritAdmin

I am in a project to re-design a city website and as city websites age there is starting to a a common vocabulary that surfaces. Common missions also bring up common tasks and functions that a website would have to handle. This part of the study was for city Facilities that are open to the public to use for leisure time. The most common English word I could come up with was parks. And Over 80% of the site agreed that if you were looking for a Park you would be in the division of the website called Parks and Recreation.

So I went to 250 different cities and ran a quick survey (I give the point system at the bottom) found that finding the pages that dealt with cities and leisure time ranged widely on the topics and systems that they had available. None off them were great I tried to find a grading system that would give me 100 point but I did not quite get there and the best site got a 62/91 which is 68.13% which would be a failing grade and I could have had 20 site that had a zero score.

Parks and Rec website often get put in the Web site Ghetto for a lot of city site. I would often have to do the search because there was no listings in the navigation for parks at all.

There often seemed to be a cultural bias easily spotted on ALOT of the sites. Urban sports over Rural sport when the city had both space. Rich white sports getting better stronger placement over other sports. There would be page upon page about how to golf in a city but nothing about soccer or night time basketball.

City Name score = 91points

  1. Arlington TX 62
  2. Long Beach 60
  3. Dayton OH 60
  4. Henderson NV 52
  5. Santa Rosa CA 50
  6. Anchorage AK 45
  7. Boise ID 45
  8. Portland OR, 45
  9. Denver 40
  10. Fort Wanye ID 38
  11. Alexandria VA 37
  12. Columbia MO 37
  13. Garland TX 35
  14. St Petersburg FL33
  15. Grand Praire TX 32
  16. Houston TX 32
  17. Lubbock TX 30
  18. Escondido CA 27
  19. Plano TX 25
  20. Albuquerque NM 24
  21. Tulsa OK 22
  22. Chandler AZ 21
  23. Gresham OR 19
  24. Hollywood FL 19
  25. Lexington KY 19
  26. Colubus OH 17
  27. Peoria AZ 17
  28. Salinas CA 17
  29. Torrance CA 17
  30. Fort Worth TX 16
  31. Philadelphia 16
  32. Boston 15
  33. Chattanooga TN 15
  34. Fort Collins, Co 15
  35. Jackson MS 15
  36. Cincinnati OH 14
  37. Montgomery AB 13
  38. Huntville AB 11
  39. Rockford IL 11
  40. Corpus Christi 10
  41. Kansas KA 10
  42. Waco 9
  43. Mcknney Tx 8
  44. Elgin Il 7
  45. Orange CA 7
  46. Salam OR 7
  47. Paterson NJ 5
  48. Huntington Beach CA 3
  49. Brownsville TX 0

    50. Grading Material
    1-5 points depending on how hard it was to find from the main page
    0. not on the front page.
    1. three levels deep in a dept other than P and R
    2. Not in the Department listing
    3. in the Department listings but not called P and R
    4. in department listing as Parks and Rec
    5. listing on the front page
    1-5 points depending on how well the site reacted to a searh for "parks"
    1-5 for how well city branding carried over to the parks div
    1-5 points for how well parks was branded
    10 points for an online registration system
    5 points for video that supported the mission
    5 points for audio that supported the mission
    2 points for facebook
    2 points for twitter
    5 points for date the content was created
    10 points for interactive maping information
    10 points for parks inventory/programs catalogs
    2 points for RSS
    10 points for a calendar based calendar (not a list of events)
    10 points for Email Alerts.

    up to -10 points if a 404, under construction or a Coming Soon Image.