Downtown Dallas websites are lacking internet savvy

by William Addington of Williamedia

While it may be great enthusiasm that propels John Crawford, president and chief executive officer of DowntownDallas, to be “interested in pursuing a national political convention” as written in recent Dallas Morning News article, I hope his enthusiasm for pursuing the RNC and DNC extend farther than they currently do for the Downtown Dallas website and its partner site, yourdspot.com.

When doing a Google search for the two keywords “Downtown Dallas,” the downtowndallas.com site is the first offering. Millions of dollars are spent every year optimizing websites in the hope that their website will show up in the first page of search engine results. The Downtown Dallas Organization certainly has its position now; all they need to do is show the waiting world that they can tell you about the many happenings in Downtown Dallas.

I wonder if any member of the Downtown Dallas organization would recommend officials from either parties to look at the downtowndallas.com site for solid info on how great Downtown Dallas is becoming and could be a great stage for their conventions in the future. You might expect a site with the name Downtown Dallas would be presenting the city center on a golden platter of opportunity to anyone who might be interested. Maybe some readers of the well-known tech industry gadget blog Engadget heard about AT&T moving their HQ to Dallas. Maybe then their interests piqued and they did a search for the downtown district and found the top result downtowndallas.com. If you have the time, I recommend reading the comments on the AT&T moves to Dallas post Engadget published; they provide another look at how some people see Dallas and AT&T former HQ city San Antonio.

It's surprising how the Downtown Dallas Organization is not taking advantage of the easiest way for them to promote Downtown Dallas to the world, the world wide web. For example, the Downtown Dallas homepage includes a current events section that shows two events that happened back in the spring of this year. The “Take a tour” button at the top of the main navigation takes you to the message, “This page is currently in development, please check back soon.” This is a page right out of the no-no in modern website design and publishing rule book -- don't launch features and or links to content that are not ready or do not exist. How about the News section? Apparently nothing has happened in Downtown Dallas except some news articles published in the year 2006. If you keep clicking through the website you will find plenty of reasons to pick at them for a lack of implementation and/or follow through.

I have to wonder when the last time someone over at the Downtown Dallas Organization even brought up the website as a topic worth discussion. Since it certainly already shows up at the top of the number one search engine Google search results, at least parts of the site should be scheduled to be updated on regular occasion, once a month at least. Maybe that’s why they launched the yourdspot.com site to provide more hip responsive website aimed at promoting events, businesses, and residential properties located within Downtown Dallas.

While the yourdspot.com site is updated on a more regular basis, it seems that the only thing the Downtown Dallas Organization knows how to do in the interactive web world is produce PDF lists of the things to do in the city center. I find it hard to believe that they actually think that people are going to walk around Downtown with a freshly printed PDF events list. They might even be surprised to learn PDF’s are not search-able by Google or any other search engine, leaving the yourdspot.com website on the third page of the coveted Google search results. Not many people go past the first five search results when using a search engine, let alone leaving the first page.

Surely the RNC or DNC will not make a decision about Dallas based on a forgotten website, but if you were a young couple looking to the modern city center as a possible new home, would you be confident in cost of living numbers that were last updated in 2004? I certainly hope they find a way back to updating both or consolidating their web properties into one regularly updated site. As a young college student attending the Downtown Dallas El Centro Community College for the last few years, I am amazed at the changes happening on the street every day and am saddened when the one group charged to promote that excitement of a city reigniting is asleep at the wheel.

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