City Launches "The Neighborhoods" Website

**etbusch** · August-30-17, 03:47 PM

http://www.theneighborhoods.org/home

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/new...ite/105093526/

Looks like an attempt to become a hub for Aaron Foley's Chief Storyteller content, as well as a place for neighborhood residents to learn about and access resources.

I'm interested to see if it gets off the ground content-wise.

**clubboss** · August-30-17, 05:03 PM

Not bad, a couple of nifty features - worth a visit. I never knew there was a Dairy Queen in District 7. There is a directory which lists districts; which in turn lists every neighborhood in each district. I had no idea there were so many neighborhoods in District 7.

**Junjie** · August-30-17, 07:48 PM

Originally Posted by etbusch

http://www.theneighborhoods.org/home

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/new...ite/105093526/

Looks like an attempt to become a hub for Aaron Foley's Chief Storyteller content, as well as a place for neighborhood residents to learn about and access resources.

I'm interested to see if it gets off the ground content-wise.

Also a 13 minute video here without a single shot of downtown or an abandoned building. Can't say I've seen many of those. This is a neat initiative and Foley is a great choice to have leading it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wouv7WwIrXI

**GMan** · August-31-17, 09:13 AM

Kudos to the initiative to showcase the "forgotten" neighborhoods.

**Király** · August-31-17, 11:33 AM

Great idea, but the website design is terrible. Too much flashiness, not enough content. Navigability is terrible. I actually found a "How to navigate" page, but I stumbled across that page by accident by clicking a tiny white unlabeled dot on the home page. "Latest stories" on the home page lists four stories, but clicking on "More stories" takes you to the same four stories.

And it blasts audio automatically when you first visit the page. It's horrid.

They should fire their web designer and get somebody who knows what they are doing.

**JBMcB** · August-31-17, 01:03 PM

Originally Posted by Király

Great idea, but the website design is terrible. Too much flashiness, not enough content. Navigability is terrible.

Someone used a mediocre mobile-responsive template and [[poorly) hacked it together. Meaning, the template used is not meant for desktop computers, it's meant for a tablet or smart phone. If you look at the page source there are comments [[unused code blocks) all over the place - meaning someone didn't take the time to clean out all the dead code before deploying. There are also broken links to Google Maps that you don't see, and the site isn't using TLS encryption, which is becoming the standard for *every* website [[understandable for old websites, inexcusable for new ones)

Good idea. Implementation is amateur night.

**kanfar** · August-31-17, 04:22 PM

Originally Posted by JBMcB

Someone used a mediocre mobile-responsive template and [[poorly) hacked it together. Meaning, the template used is not meant for desktop computers, it's meant for a tablet or smart phone. If you look at the page source there are comments [[unused code blocks) all over the place - meaning someone didn't take the time to clean out all the dead code before deploying. There are also broken links to Google Maps that you don't see, and the site isn't using TLS encryption, which is becoming the standard for *every* website [[understandable for old websites, inexcusable for new ones)

Good idea. Implementation is amateur night.

Agree 100%. The idea is wonderful but I too was very disappointed

**Junjie** · August-31-17, 10:03 PM

Originally Posted by Király

Great idea, but the website design is terrible. Too much flashiness, not enough content. Navigability is terrible. I actually found a "How to navigate" page, but I stumbled across that page by accident by clicking a tiny white unlabeled dot on the home page. "Latest stories" on the home page lists four stories, but clicking on "More stories" takes you to the same four stories.

And it blasts audio automatically when you first visit the page. It's horrid.

They should fire their web designer and get somebody who knows what they are doing.

They only launched with three stories and have now added three more. The site shows four, so now the "more stories" button takes you to all six.

Autoplay audio is terrible and needs to be removed.

The navigation definitely needs some help - I only just now realized that there is supposed to be side-to-side navigation going on. Going along with what JBMcB said, maybe this is supposed to work well on mobile but it wasn't at all obvious from my PC.

Also seems to have only been tested in Chrome [[and maybe Safari but I don't have any Apple gear). Firefox has some weird button overlap in the top right. Edge has the same layout issue and also the audio doesn't work.