Visitors to www.interior.gov might feel like they’ve entered a time warp. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill never occurred, the Minerals Management Service remains intact and the lead story on the home page is about Interior Secretary Ken Salazar commending employees for all their hard work…in 2009.
So who set back the clock?
It looks like Interior failed to link together the various iterations of its Web address. Visitors who type in www.doi.gov will get the current website, which was overhauled at the beginning of the year. But visitors who type in www.interior.gov will see a world that appears to have ended shortly after the calendar turned to 2010.
Clicking on a few of the tabs, such as “DOI Home” and “Bureaus and Offices” and will take visitors to the updated site. Yet many other links are broken. And some — such as the news tab — continue to function as if the site is current, even though the most recent news article was posted Dec. 22.
We here at Fedline hope Interior resolves the issue soon. Of course, things could be worse. It’s not like Interior’s website has been shut down or anything.
2 Comments
A cursory search of Google or Bing for “department of the interior” or “united states department of the interior” will yield results that point to the actual Department of the Interior website, located at http://www.doi.gov. There is an entire subsite dedicate to Deep Water Horizon. This seems to be a simple matter of redirecting the old site to the new one. However, I would put to you that the vast majority of informed users would search for DOI, and be linked to the proper site from one of the major search engines.
No offense, bit I would suggest you do a bit more research before you simply blast away at the department of the interior.
Interior’s IG’s site also recently went through a redesign, so a lot of previous links to reports are now bad, which is unfortunate. So far the MMS site is preserved, though I worry about that information getting lost with the creation of the new bureaus.