Mayou Angelou, Horned Beast & New Orleans City Web Page

New Orleans’ city’s web page, while having plenty of useful information somewhere in it, has always had a pretty crappy search feature that rarely finds what’s relevant and which takes forever and usually times out before bringing anything up. Like I tell my students, better to use a Google search and restrict it to the domain for the city’s web page.

But the city and its web page has enough problems without exacerbating things by putting up this picture of Maya Angelou, who was in town recently to speak somewhere and to whom the mayor gave some proclamation, said picture making her look like a horned demon-beast:


I’m sure this is a badly-cropped picture of her wearing a cutting-edge stylish hat, but come on. Doesn’t somebody at City Hall look at this stuff before it gets posted? Maybe its just me, but I saw it and thought right away - whoah! Somebody photo-shopped a horn onto Maya Angelou’s head!

Here’s a more typical problem with their web page: I subscribe to a city e-mail news list and want to change it to a new address. I can unsubscribe via a copy of the current mailing at my old address, but searching for “e-mail list”/“email list”, etc., didn’t find anything, but looking for “subscribe” took me - jeez! - to the “subscription confirmation” notice, but not the actual subscription page. (The only OTHER hit from “subscribe” is a page about the city police department’s education and training program.)

New Orleans' streets are pitted with countless potholes and we still have tens of thousands of blighted and un-remediated houses from Katrina, so the city's web page is really the least of our worries, but it is at least something pretty limited and finite that shouldn’t be hard to make effective, easy to use, and without making Maya Angelou look like Tim Curry from Legend:

(There is more than a passing resemblance, if you ask me.)