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More TTC website woes

Panzerfaust

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I posted this on the Transit Toronto group on February 28th, but I figured I would showcase the ineptness of the TTC's web designers on here as well.

Backstory: as many of you should know, the University-Spadina subway is closed until noon today from St. Clair West to Union for track replacement. As you also know, this is a major announcement which will affect many, many people. As such, it is understandable that the TTC would put a link to this important announcement on their homepage, and they would make it rather visible. There's only one problem, that being that the link is broken... and has been since they first posted it on the night of the 27th.

I noticed this during the early afternoon on the 28th, but I found out later on from my friend that she had noticed it go up sometime on the evening of the 27th and hadn't been able to access it then. It seems that the web developers placed a \ where there should have been a /, causing a Page Not Found error. Obviously, this is a very bad thing, as a person with little knowledge of technology whom is trying to check the announcement would be utterly clueless. It blows my mind that they wouldn't even bother to click their own link to make sure it works, but that is neither here nor there.

Being the good citizen I am, I immediately shot off an email to the tech support address on the error page. I received a response within an hour, quite impressive really. The response? Apparently the City of Toronto developers don't maintain the TTC pages. That's right, the address on the error page isn't even the right one. The guy who responded said he was forwarding it to the TTC developers though, so I figured all was good. In the meantime, I looked all over the TTC site and saw that there is, in fact, no way to get in contact with the people in charge of the site. Wonderful.

It has now been nearly three days since I sent the email. The link has still not been fixed. That's right, a matter of switching a single character in order to allow people to access a very important announcement has still not been fixed after three days. I refuse to believe that I was the only one who noticed, because that just seems implausible, so I'm assuming they had at least a few other people contact them.

This is utterly ridiculous. Honestly, we all know their website is an abomination, but apparently their web developers aren't even willing to make their links work right after receiving complaints. I plan on emailing Mr. Giambrone about this, but I figured I'd just get this out there to the people on here as well.
 
I understand that the TTC awarded Devlin a $300,000 contract to redo their site and maintain it as well (I would hope)... don't know the timeline on it though.

One would expect issues like this to go away after this relaunch.
 
Thanks for pointing this out, Panzerfaust. The TTC's communications have been perplexing me more and more as of late. (I blame Joe Clark, ever since I went on his tour I've been looking at the intuitiveness and clarity of TTC messages and signage, and they always seem to come up short.)
 
$432,000

The Devlin contract was actually for $432,000. They were the only “qualified†bidder.
 
Update: The diversion is now over, yet still the link does not work. Thus, for the several days before the diversion to after it was over, the link was not working.

I sent the following email to Mr. Giambrone after posting this last night. Was I right to use the chair@ttc.ca address?

Dear Mr. Giambrone,

I am writing to you in regards to an error on the TTC website that has, despite an email to the site developers, gone unfixed for nearly three days.

As you are aware, the University subway is set to be closed today and replaced with bus service. This is a very important piece of information, likely effecting thousands of people, and it stands to reason that a PDF announcement would be put up on the TTC homepage. However, the link to this announcement has been broken for at least three days now.

When attempting to view it, I recieved a page not found error. Upon looking closer, I realized that the web developers misplaced a backslash, leading to the error. After fixing the URL myself, I was able to access the announcement fine. However, it occurred to me that someone with little technical knowledge would be utterly stumped at why the link isn't working. This being an important announcement and all, I decided to email the address that was given on the error page, that being webdevelopers@toronto.ca

Within the hour, I recieved a response from one Keith McDonald. He told me that they weren't responsible for maintaining the TTC pages. However, he stated that he was forwarding the email to the TTC developers. I figured that this was good, and I left it at that. However, I was astounded that, no matter how hard I looked through the TTC site, I could not find a single contact address for the TTC web developers. One would think that this would be important in a situation like this, seeing as how the City of Toronto developers don't cover the TTC.

That was three days ago. In those three days, the link has still not been fixed. This means that for three days, people have been seeing this big yellow and black announcement right in the middle of the home page, clicking it to see how it will effect them, and finding that they can't access it.

There are one of two possibilities here: either A) Mr. McDonald never forwarded the message and somehow nobody else reported a problem, or B) the developers have been ignoring the problem/aren't aware of it for some unholy reason. I refuse to believe that I was the only person who contacted them about it, so I'm leaning towards the second option. I have no idea why it's such an issue for them to fix a single character in the address, a five second job, especially considering the importance of the issue at hand.

I figured that contacting you would be the best bet here, since it seems my attempts at contacting the right people have fallen on deaf ears. Though it's probably too late now, given how the diversion starts in six hours, I'd kind of like to know how this simple error was overlooked for so long to start with, never mind after recieving an email about it. I'm trying to give your web developers the benefit of the doubt here, but it's sort of difficult at this point.

Sincerely,
Tyler Rubini
 
Works now, are you sure you haven't been loading the page from an old cache?
I cleared my cache a half dozen times and tried two different browsers just to make sure it wasn't my cache. However, now it seems to be working in only Internet Explorer. Strange.
 
old Safari too.
Alright, so I guess we can change this from "TTC developers can't fix broken links" to "TTC developers can't make their website work right on different browsers". I just sent my friend to the TTC website and he gets an error in Firefox when viewing the announcement as well. Something wicked is afoot.
 
All web developers should not only test their websites on all browsers (ie. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.), versions, PC or Mac, but also DSL and the old dial-up systems.
Not only are there still people who use dial-up, but sometimes the traffic is so much it slows the DSL services as well.
 
surely there's a page somewhere showing estimates of the number of people using various browsers and connections...

how many people in the GTA still use dial-up? i'm curious...
 
A designer should make sure their site works on any browser. It's definitely irritating to try and get it working properly with Safari.
 
aha -- an explanation of my commentary, which is intended to be tongue-in-cheek and exaggerated -- as well as self-deprecatory:

part A: i over-react

part B: i eat my hat
 

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