Technology flaw forces state to pull the plug on its new tourism site

A redesign of the state’s tourism website has been pulled after the underlying technology proved too weak to power all of its functions.

Richard Davies, executive director of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, said his staff had problems with the internal part of the website, and consumers were having trouble with searches and other functions.

Parks and Tourism Department employees depend on the internal website to perform their day-to-day jobs, Davies said.

“We couldn’t afford to be fiddling with it,” Davies said. “You would expect, with any new website, there are going to be days where you have kinks to work out, but this is worse than that.”

Little Rock-based Aristotle Inc. redesigned the site and had designed the older website.

The company has a $1.3 million contract with the Parks and Tourism Department. It covers the redesign of arkansas.com and work on arkansasstateparks.com, keeparkansasbeautiful.com and ark-ives.com, Davies said.

Arkansas.comcom’s redesign is the largest component of the contract, he said.

Marla Johnson, chief executive of Aristotle Inc., said the site’s complexity, popularity and responsive design led to problems.

A responsive website allows a single Web page to be viewed differently on desktops, tablets and phones.

There are 12.6 gigabytes of data in the website’s database, 35,000 pages indexed on Google and 150,000 content items, she said.

“The performance of the responsive platform just couldn’t handle it,” Johnson said. “So we are in the process of fixing that.”

Davies said initial attempts to fix the site proved unsuccessful.

“I remember trying to fix a pipe under my house and when I tightened one pipe, another one loosened,” he said. “If you fixed A, B and C, all of sudden D, E and F stopped working.”

Johnson said the redesigned site was online from March 5 to about March 26.

Davies said he asked the resigned site be pulled and replaced with the older version since it didn’t have issues.

The redesigned site was based on Orchard, a contentmanagement system like WordPress or Drupal. Content-management systems allow nontechnical users to manage websites.

Johnson said the underlying platform — Orchard — couldn’t keep up with the complexity of the website.

The original website used a custom content-management system developed by Aristotle, Johnson said.

“The new site will merge the new responsive design that tested well with website visitors and the content management system Aristotle custom designed for the department,” she said in an email. “This will resolve both the user-interface and internal department needs and will ensure that Arkansas.comArkansas.com retains its position in the tourism ecosystem.”

“We expect this responsive phase of our continuous quality improvement initiatives to have a timeframe of 60-90 days,” she said in an email in response to a question about the timeline for getting the updated site online.

Davies said the older version of the site was functioning well and will remain up until the problems with the new version are resolved.

“It has to function from the admin side as much as it functions from the consumer side,” he said. “This is Aristotle’s problem to deal with.”

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