Airport Websites

I recently spent a week in Hawaii, and I posted something on my Why I Love Chicago blog with my thoughts comparing O’hare and Honolulu airports.

In doing a bit of poking around on the web, I came across the websites for each airport: O’hare and Honolulu.

This got me thinking… why can’t airports have a decent website? Both the O’Hare and Honolulu airport are terrible. Abominable is also a good word. Other words, more appropriate for a description are less family-friendly.

For starters, the Honolulu site is in frames. I haven’t seen a site in frames since about 1998, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this site is at least that old. The O’Hare site is slightly better (not saying much), but the graphic design is atrocious. I’m only viewing these sites in Firefox because I’m afraid I might have a stroke if I see them in IE.

Oddly enough, I was surprised that the homepage for Honolulu airport only had 11 W3C errors – compared to the 171 found on the O’hare site.

You mean to tell me that the city and state governments (or whoever is in charge of these projects) can’t pay a web design company to design and maintain a decent site? Or how about they just hire one or two developers???

I think a little piece of me just died inside. . .