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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

City / Teh Internets Did Norfolk.gov Crib Seattle.gov?

Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 12:48 PM

In October, Mayor McGinn presented the new face of Seattle.gov, a more streamlined city government website. Here's a screenshot of the front page of Seattle.gov. Yesterday, the city of Norfolk, Virginia launched their new website. Here's a screenshot of the front page of their website. The similarities between the two websites are striking. How striking? One page promoted a press release titled "Seattle Symphony to play free concert at City Hall."

Further, both sites feature a rotating picture on the front page, different layers of tabbed browsing, a central box full of recent press releases, with very similar contact information boxes running down the right hand of the page. Both pages are very alike in terms of style and formatting. Over e-mail, I pointed out the similarity to Norfolk.gov webmaster Ron Hiser. He responded: "We used [Seattle.gov] as a model. It looked very nice and clean. I tried to contact the webmaster but never got a reply. It would have made our job a lot easier."

However, at norfolk.gov/newnorfolk/ up until a few minutes ago, you could find a page promoting "Seattle Channel Videos" and press releases touting "Green Up Seattle," along with a link to "City of Denver Home" along the top. This is a screenshot of the page, and a detail is after the jump. When approached for comment about the Norfolk.gov site with Seattle city information on it, Hiser replied "It looks like it might be something that we were testing at the time to get different looks. We actually used our own coding but tried to blend some different looks together to see what might look best." At the time of this writing, the /newnorfolk/ page is no longer available.

When asked for comment, McGinn spokesman Aaron Pickus said, "We’re flattered that they liked our design."

Screen_shot_2011-02-02_at_12.11.53_PM.png

Comments (24) RSS

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I guess you didn't save the source and give a side-by-side comparison to that webmaster? It's gotta be floating around in cache somewhere.

Posted by dirac on February 2, 2011 at 12:58 PM

In Firefox, View> Page Source for code comparisons.

Posted by Maggie on February 2, 2011 at 1:02 PM

The HTML markup on their homepage is riddled with references to Mayor McGinn.

Posted by HTML Monkey on February 2, 2011 at 1:13 PM

Who gives a shit? Why are you wasting the public employees' time with this inane bullshit?

Posted by what the shit on February 2, 2011 at 1:21 PM

Bet those Norfolk web programmers could get jobs at Microsoft.

Posted by Don't you think he looks tired? on February 2, 2011 at 1:26 PM

ZOMG! .govgate!

We should applaud this innovative time saving by public employees!

(still kind of funny though)

Posted by Amnt on February 2, 2011 at 1:34 PM

heh... it's common practice for "small" organizations like cities, schools, libraries, etc. to borrow applications and web sites from each other to then customize. They can be expensive to build from scratch and why do all the extra work if all you need to do is swap out pictures, titles, and text?

Of course it's totally lazy to just do most of the work without actually proofreading anything and plop it online... ;)

Posted by Beetlecat on February 2, 2011 at 1:35 PM

Sounds like they bing'd it!

Posted by RonK, Seattle on February 2, 2011 at 1:48 PM

This webmaster is a hack. It's actually more work to steal a design and edit it than it would be to use a CMS and change the design.

Posted by Mike in Olympia on February 2, 2011 at 1:49 PM

♫ We don't drink and we don't smoke! Norfolk! Norfolk! ♫

Posted by droers on February 2, 2011 at 2:00 PM

Pretty funny.

The real scandal here is if Seattle was suckererd by some web design firm into building its site from scratch.

Posted by seandr on February 2, 2011 at 2:13 PM

if these were commercial websites this would matter. somewhere .gov sites should have a creative commons licensing.

i disagree @11, unless you are just joking. a good, serviceable website is well worth the money.

Posted by aardvark on February 2, 2011 at 2:18 PM

As long as they didn't crib all the text of our new site, which has some clunkers:

Seattle has many unique points of interests people identify with.

Here are some suggestions on where to stay, eat or shop directly, but we can provide you with links to other web sites where you can find all the information you will need to make your decisions.

Posted by gloomy gus on February 2, 2011 at 2:39 PM

I wonder if they have lots of salmon in Norfolk ...

Posted by Will in Seattle

on February 2, 2011 at 2:42 PM

In an era where bittorrenting of movies, music and all sorts of creative work is given a pass I hardly find one city lifting some website code from another city -- rather than reinventing the wheel at the going rate for city employees -- worth even raising an eyebrow.

Posted by bigyaz on February 2, 2011 at 2:56 PM

@12 a good, serviceable website is well worth the money.

Agreed. Reinventing the wheel? Not worth the money.

Posted by seandr on February 2, 2011 at 3:07 PM

Inane is the favorite word of bloggers and commenters. Right up there with insipid as an overused word people learned on the internet.

Posted by dirac on February 2, 2011 at 3:17 PM

Well, people with, you know, jobs, create websites. Just copying one "saves money" like stealing saves money.

Posted by in-frequent on February 2, 2011 at 4:02 PM

ha-HA! http://www.norfolk.gov/ rolls back!

Posted by Little Tickled on February 2, 2011 at 4:57 PM

16 and 18, template sites suck, as you may know. not because of the design, but because design is best suited to the content. yes i am a web developer. once upon a time i thought templating would overtake custom sites, but templated sites are so obviously clunky and a pain to use. when a manager says he wants to copy something and not reinvent the wheel usually it's just about cutting corners and inviting suck.

in any case it is hilarious if these guys really did copy the source code. hilarious because its doomed to failure. some manager's decision no doubt.

Posted by aardvark on February 2, 2011 at 5:01 PM

New tattoo: "Seattle has many unique points of interests people identify with."

Posted by David Schmader on February 2, 2011 at 5:06 PM

@20: Fair enough. As a software engineer and business owner, I built my company's web site from the ground up, so I guess I don't even practice what I preach.

Posted by seandr on February 2, 2011 at 9:31 PM

As someone who has lived in the Norfolk region for almost the last 20 years this doesn't really surprise me. This is a city who, for 12 of the last 13 years, paid an employee a salary even though she didn't show up for work.

Posted by AnthonyCAdams on February 3, 2011 at 2:27 PM

Um. Yeah, in that case should we all be up in arms that Seattle stole the Business - Resident - Visitor - Government navigation from Las Vegas? (Although most probably not directly....) Is the point to be different and special snowflakes, or serve citizens with timely information and access to services.

Posted by amhlaidgh on February 4, 2011 at 9:56 AM