A reader writes in, disappointed with the latest iteration of SCVSheriff.com:
It looks like every other Sheriff's Department website out there. Take a look:
This is the new SCV Sheriff's station website. Compare it to Antelope Valley's:
You can just picture some IT administrator at the County giddy that he's finally united the Department's disparate web properties into one single generic template. Centralization is the dream of IT & web page managers.
Don't get me wrong, the new site has all the vital info on the local Sheriff's presence. But it's definitely centralized and it doesn't feel as local as the old sites did.
It was a monumental effort on the part of the local Sheriff's station & City to update the old site back in the late 2000s. They went from this late 90s version(complete with spinning 90s-era text effects, a FrontPage-esque background, scrolling banners and coding by a Deputy):
to this attractive and simple-to-use blog format which featured rich content, like the Ask Sgt. Harris series:
I've think there has always been a bit of tension between the City & Sheriff's station over how law enforcement & crime news is reported. When the site above went live in 2008 or so, it became a news destination site all on its own, separate from the City's well-organized news & social media properties. It even sported an RSS feed for a time, with entries written by actual SCV Deputies.
Now when you click the News link on the new Sheriff's website, you're dropped into the LASD's main news page, where you might or might not read SCV-related stories.
A step backward for sure. We used to hear directly from our Station's personnel; now it feels as if everything has to go through Downtown LA first.
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The Many Faces of SCVSheriff.com
The new sheriff's station website is billed as "new and improved." It might be new, but improved? Wait, you're right, let's take an easy to navigate, attractive site tailored specifically to the SCV and replace it with a clunky site that looks exactly the same for every sheriff's station in the county. Now that's what I call improved!I agree. It's not even SCVSheriff.com anymore, that URL simply redirects to a County website with the incomprehensible url http://shq.lasdnews.net/pages/patrolstation.aspx?id=SCT.
It looks like every other Sheriff's Department website out there. Take a look:
This is the new SCV Sheriff's station website. Compare it to Antelope Valley's:
You can just picture some IT administrator at the County giddy that he's finally united the Department's disparate web properties into one single generic template. Centralization is the dream of IT & web page managers.
Don't get me wrong, the new site has all the vital info on the local Sheriff's presence. But it's definitely centralized and it doesn't feel as local as the old sites did.
It was a monumental effort on the part of the local Sheriff's station & City to update the old site back in the late 2000s. They went from this late 90s version(complete with spinning 90s-era text effects, a FrontPage-esque background, scrolling banners and coding by a Deputy):
to this attractive and simple-to-use blog format which featured rich content, like the Ask Sgt. Harris series:
I've think there has always been a bit of tension between the City & Sheriff's station over how law enforcement & crime news is reported. When the site above went live in 2008 or so, it became a news destination site all on its own, separate from the City's well-organized news & social media properties. It even sported an RSS feed for a time, with entries written by actual SCV Deputies.
Now when you click the News link on the new Sheriff's website, you're dropped into the LASD's main news page, where you might or might not read SCV-related stories.
A step backward for sure. We used to hear directly from our Station's personnel; now it feels as if everything has to go through Downtown LA first.
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