Town Square

Thanks for the link/compliment. What I find most bewildering about the Town Square ‘microsite’ scheme is that is seems to be a government funded organization competing (however poorly) with private business. This isn’t really our target market, so it’s not my money, but if a business ever did decide to spend some cash on a “microsite” with Town Squate, that business is being lost by other small web firms.

It is not only lost revenue to those good people that would provide intellegent design - but it is also wasted expenditure from a presumably limited source that won’t be replaced. The ungodly amount that was announced for the total project is gone and is not available for sensible work or development of the sector…let alone not avialble to fund something properly in the government realm like PEI’s lack of child psychologists for kids with learning disabilities. The priorities are whacked.

An open letter to the Virtual Charlottetown Project… ?

Town Square seems to have been founded on the premise that
no one has a website. There is no provision (other than buying
a banner ad) to include existing sites in their framework,
which is, I suspect, the reason for the Do It Centre’s “Mini-Me”
version of its regular site. They have to be able to include
the hundreds of existing sites already built in the greater
Ch’town area. They also have to be able to have an easy
way for a new company to build a website that won’t be an
embarrassment to the company, and to Townsquare. Maybe that
means referring requests to a bona fide web designer who would
build the site framework under the Town Square umbrella
(do town squares have umbrellas?), and include
“content areas” that the user can easily change.

The Townsquare site reloads itself every minute, probably to inflate the hit counter. I bet there is a PC somewhere (in the ATC?) with about 50 instances of Explorer sitting there clicking away, justifying those government dollars.
Throw more money at technology! We don’t care what it does, other than looking good to us, we like technology!
I just wish I got paid to build Townsquare.

But why a portal? Why do you “need to include” perfectly sensible websites in…another website? Did anyone ask whether having that great 1996 idea of a portal made any sense before throwing nine million - that was the quoted budget, wasn’t it - nine million at it.

Just another example of wasted tax money. The intentions of Virtual Charlottetown were good, the results stink. I have a question for all of you living in the Charlottetown Region, has Town Square made you life on-line less of a hassle? Chances are it hasn’t, and won’t.

They had the money to do something great, what happened?

Re: the need for a portal
Until search engines get much, much better, there is a definite
need for portals which provide localized community directories.

Let’s use an example:
If you want to find the Sherwood Do It Centre, or Southport Home Hardware,
or Schurman’s, or the little hardware store in Cornwall, or Metro Building supplies,
or Bagnall’s, you would think that going to Google.ca, and
typing in something like:
Charlottetown area building supplies dealer
would return you a nice list of stores in the Charlottetown
area which specialize in building supplies.
Schurman’s, Home Hardware, and Do-It all have websites (some of the
others may too). If you are new to the Ch’town area,
I dare you to find any of them (without knowing
their name) using a search engine!

Even though portals still have a use, a portal which requires you
to buy a microsite to get listed is probably not the best
way to spend 9 million dollars!

A directory of Island businesses exists on Yahoo. Google found all the named bulding supply shops in 0.33 seconds. Steve Garrity, being a “Smart Person”, got Google to do it in 0.21 seconds. No fee. Can I spend the 9 million how I want now?

Peter, could you list and describe the “laudable” things in the townsquare project? Your sleuthing skills must be more refined than mine.

Re finding building supply stores without a portal:

You guys must be good! When I go to the Yahoo Canada Business Finder
for PEI and type in “Building supply”, it gives me only one
place: Leisure World! (maybe your houses are made out of Popsicle(tm)/craft sticks)

Going to Google, I was not able to locate any of the stores
with “Charlottetown area building supplies dealer”.
With “building supply stores pei” I was able to locate Schurman’s.

My point is that “casual” searchers have great difficulty in
locating local businesses without a portal or business directory.
BTW, I did find one portal with a directory of PEI businesses
which was able to locate the stores: InfoPEI (www.gov.pe.ca/infopei),
built by some guy named Rukavina!
(you’ll have to ask him whether he got $9 million for it…)

Try “Charlottetown bulding supplies”…

…not wanting to be snarky, Derek, just to show it is already there…

…not wanting to be snarky, Derek, just to show it is already there…

Your stuttering again Alan

townsquare doesnt help us out at all, however it may help some people out. Not sure exactly who, but their has to be ONE person out their!
John
www.PEIinfo.com

I just wish I had known about the 9Mil industry canada and stake holders were spending prior to attempting to do the same thing out of my own pocket (odd though, I was online first, and had the same price / mini site as townsquare finally set on). mine was a ‘web presence without the web’ as company slogan.

The intent of the my site is now gone, but the virtual charlottetown is coming along nicely.

I started working on it (models) back in 1997.

www.pei-canada.com

much more to do, but I’m now getting about 1 building / week modeled.

The image maps are now the big slowdown.

But as was said before, townsqure sucks.