I've only blogged once before about the California Festival, but it is upon us, starting this Friday, November 3. I'm not going to be able to get out of the Bay Area in the first two weeks of the month, owing to reviews the next two weeks and looming work deadlines, so it took until today for me to take a look at the Festival's web site. That was with prompting from a friend, who mentioned that he "was hoping [I'd] tell [him] there was some obvious way of sorting the California Festival events by location on their website."
Well, I looked, and I was appalled by what I saw. Let me count, er, bullet-list the issues:
- There's no way to sort the events by location. This is a real problem with a festival that stretches from Fort Bragg to somewhere south of San Diego. (I think - the map to the left of the concert list is of dubious usefulness because you can't click on a location and see what's being performed there or when.)
- The address for each participating organization in the chronological listing bears no resemblance to the concert locations and in some cases to the physical location of the organization. I am highly dubious that 15 Van Ness Avenue is the, or a, correct address for the San Francisco Symphony, one of the three orchestras that organized the festival. That's not the address of Davies Symphony Hall, and in fact it's south of Market Street! What's with the Nordhoff St. address of the Colburn School of Music in LA? The school is across the street and down the block from Walt Disney Concert Hall. Nordhoff Street seems to be...in "Sherwood Forest"?
- You can't copy/paste from the concert list page.
- You can't do an effective search on the concert list page because the page doesn't scroll in response to a search in your browser.
- The site is slow, even on my M2 Mac Mini. Transitions from page to page don't actually take forever, but it seems that way: I'm counting between two and three seconds when you navigate from a details page to the list page. Whoever designed the site seems not to have tested on older computers.
- It's...ugly. Somehow there's enough contrast on the concert listing page even though I think that it features green type on a cream background.
- All those exploding graphics do nothing for usability; they slow down the site; there are two of them every time you navigate from concert details to the concert listing.
- There is no persistence! If you view a particular listing, when you click Back, you are taken back to listings for November 3. That's right: view a listing for November 17, try to get back to the list page, and you'll be looking at listings for November 3.
Folks, web sites are about 30 years old. I created my person web site in 1996, with a copy of Laura LeMay's Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week. That web site is still posted, though I rarely update it. It is much faster to navigate than the California Festival web site, because it's as basic as you can get. Regardless, there is no damn excuse for a festival sponsored by three of the biggest performing arts organizations in the state to have such a very terrible web site.
