Is Dr Errol Cort still the minister of Finance

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latest tech

Thursday, 17 February 2011 06:55

By caribarena news

Is Dr Errol Cort still the minister of Finance? The average person might get that impression after researching Antigua & Barbuda online.

According to figures from Google alone, there are more than 4,400 of these average people searching every month.

So why the mix-up? It all started when the government decided to have a new website. But when you build a new website, you also need to facilitate a transition between the old one and the new. That way, users and search engines don't confuse the two.

The old government website's homepage redirects to the new site, but what about all the other pages?

Press releases, ministerial profiles, government announcements... all of those have to be redirected too.

However, these redirects were not put in place, and these pages are not being updated. The result - people are being misinformed.

Where did the technicians at the Ministry of Information go wrong? Even if the technicians deliberately decided not to redirect, they should have taken into account that these pages should have been updated. And while keeping these pages around is perfectly OK, you have to get the story straight with Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Right now, if you search for "Antigua" or "Antigua Government," you will reach the old version and its outdated information. There are a number of tools that these search engines allow you to use to update their information. Sitemaps, for instance, let search engines know what pages you have on your site that you want indexed. The search engine(s) then serve the indexed page to the user. Currently, it would appear that only the old website has pages indexed in search engines, because it is very difficult to find pages from the new website.

This is a critical mistake. Half of all the traffic that most websites receive comes from search engines. The pages of the old website have been outdated for at least two years, considering the date of the last election (and thus the change in government roles). Assuming the same user search rate, this means that about 158,400 people have seen incorrect information on the government website, including the outdated portfolios.

Now, let's talk about the new government website, and why it doesn't perform as well as the old one in search engines. The answer is not an easy one. Search engines will help you, but they will never tell you exactly how they check websites. The general best thing to do is put META tags. These tags are specific pieces of information that a website gives to a search engine, which explain what the page is about. The main important ones are:

The Title Tag
The Meta Description Tag
The ROBOTS tag

The title tag is exactly that, it sets the title or name of the page. This is perhaps the single most crucial tag. Without it, a page is nameless. If you had no name, how will anyone call you? Search engines have the same problem. The Meta description is a brief description of the page. The ROBOTS tag is a little more complicated, so we won't explain it here. There is a vast amount of material available online about these tags, for those interested.

So, how do these tags appear on the government's new website? First of all, there is no title tag. The pages of the new website have no names. This is a fundamental mistake, and it causes more damage to the search engine ranks than any other error. There is a meta description, but (on the home page) it is very short, and doesn't present anything interesting or constructive. And unfortunately, the ROBOTS tag is also missing.

This combination of fundamental errors has caused a serious drop in search engine rankings. There was a time when you searched for Antigua, and the first website that appeared was the government's. The mistakes described above are the reason that no longer happens.


The government has made a royal mess of its websites, and this article is hoped to be the first step in getting it back on the right track, in the right direction. We are not here to make fools of the government, or to make the IT department look incompetent. We hope instead that the government recognizes the problems in their website, and acts quickly to fix them, for the betterment of our twin-island nation.

In today's world, your homepage is the face of your island, and it is absolutely crucial that the government website(s) set a good example.

 

 

http://www.ab.gov.ag/gov_v2/government/shared/bio_errolcort.html

http://www.ab.gov.ag/gov_v2/government/shared/cabinetold.html

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