Official state Web page falls short

His commitment to technology has earned him the nickname “Governor Laptop,” a man who has worked tirelessly to bridge the digital divide that is one of the great impediments to progress in Maine.

So how is it that Gov. Angus King, who extols the benefits of the World Wide Web with an almost missionary zeal, allows state government to maintain an official Web site that all but shouts “disconnect” to anyone who attempts to wade through it for information?

I decided to explore the highly touted new www.maine.gov portal after my colleague Bruce Kyle highlighted some of the site’s more user-unfriendly aspects in an op-ed column last week. He wrote how the clumsily designed site chose to ignore the fact that such places as Calais, Machias, Houlton, Bar Harbor and Rockland really do exist on Maine maps, and that the online greeting from our governor would make a much better impression on both Mainers and people “from away” if it weren’t riddled with typos and bad grammar. And tourists who might be thinking about coming to Maine this summer, he suggested, would be better off to forgo the site entirely and just drive up here to look around for themselves.

Could Maine’s official new Web site really be so uninspired?

This being the height of the summer tourist season, I put myself in the sneakers of a potential visitor and took the site for a test-drive. I gave it the easiest task I could think of, which was to inform me about the fun things I could expect if I were to attend the National Folk Festival in Bangor in late August.

Considering that the festival is the biggest entertainment event this state has ever hosted, a three-day wingding that is expected to draw some 75,000 people willing to leave piles of tourist dollars behind, I figured I’d see a colorful banner on the site that heralded the major event. But there was nothing. So I scanned the list of helpful categories on the home page, the one that begins with a link to “pay traffic tickets,” and found one that offered assistance in planning my Maine vacation.

I clicked, and was sent to a page that required that I click the same link again, and then once more for good measure.

Finally, I spotted a link to a calendar of coming arts and music events in Maine. Bingo! Surely this one would direct me to some mention of the folk festival. But when I clicked it, all I got was a brief list of events, most of which I’d never heard of, that were scheduled only from July 4 to Aug. 8. Our summer is plenty short enough already, I thought, without having the state’s official Web site declare that Maine had shut down long before the leaves turned color.

I continued to navigate the site doggedly, which is far more than any self-respecting visitor should be expected to do, but could not find the festival mentioned anywhere. I then clicked on a link for “performing arts,” and was directed to the Maine Music Trail and a page that told me everything I would ever need to know and more about the Maine Arts Commission, including a list of its meetings. When I asked a search engine to unearth the folk festival, which I thought had to be buried somewhere on the state site, the program kept trying to make contact with the state’s old Web address, which is now defunct.

Finally, I asked another of the site’s search engines for all of the “tourist attractions” in the Bangor area and got only Blackbeard’s Family Fun Park – a perfectly fine suggestion had I been planning a Maine vacation around go-karts and minigolf, which I wasn’t.

I simply wanted to know about the National Folk Festival, the huge event that’s coming to Bangor next month and for two summers thereafter, and I got nothing for my effort – not even a link to the festival’s own home page. The same for the North Atlantic Blues Festival, which will draw thousands of music lovers to the Rockland waterfront this weekend. The same for the Senior Little League World Series, which will bring 15- and 16-year-old baseball players from around the world to vie for the championship at Bangor’s Mansfield Stadium Aug 11-17. The same, in fact, for dozens of other wonderful events around the state that www.maine.gov has either chosen to ignore entirely or made maddeningly difficult to discover.

Is it too much to ask, Gov. King, that the fatal errors in our new portal to Vacationland be fixed before summer slips away?