Zoo Atlanta: Fix your site (in a number of ways)
We go to the Atlanta Zoo quite a bit -- I'd say 8-10 times/year. We have a season pass so that makes it quite affordable, and the girls have a good time.
I recently got a new GPS, so I thought I'd plug the zoo address in there. I fired up my iPhone, typed in their URL and got this:
Ahh, so pretty. 100% flash. Done. I ended up just waiting for the Garmin to find it though it's POI database (sloooow, but effective).
The sad thing is, the site isn't 100% flash. They've just got some weird flash-detect script that means that the Flash-less among us (like iPhones) are DOA. Stupid.
They've got a few other problems as well:
Zoo News, which lists a variety of zoo-related news items, doesn't have an RSS feed? Why not? If I came to the site and cared enough to click on the news, I might actually want to keep up with it. Why not let me? Heck, just make it a blog and you'll get many more benefits as well (ping new entries, etc). Also, "Zoo News" isn't clickable from the home page. Weird.
The Panda Cam page, arguably the only useful page after directions, hours and cost, "will go dark at 5 p.m. on December 31, 2008". Hurry!
"Best viewed with Internet Explorer at 1024x768, Windows 2000+, Mac OSX, Flash 6 or above". Where was I that I saw a bunch of sites with instructions like that? Oh yeah, 1998.
The "Press Room" link at the top of the site is broken when clicked from a variety of pages ("Calendar", "Careers", etc).
The site doesn't canonicalize properly (force www or non-www into the URL). Most small sites don't, but it's just kinda sloppy.
Don't get me wrong -- the zoo is great. We had a wonderful time there today. Too bad their site is such a mess.