The Cherry Orchard

The 61st General Assembly of the United Nations is going to convene in mid-September, and since I live in New York City I thought I’d pop on to UN.org, the official United Nations website to check out the session agenda and plan a possible visit.

I was about to be taken on a surreal trip. After spending two and a half hours reviewing various sections of this website, I am disgusted that such an important website is being run so shabbily. Does anyone in this organization realize that internet communication is an important, growing trend? I state above that Al-Qaeda has better websites than the United Nations. How do I know this? Well, I am a professional web designer, and I follow my field enough to know that there are numerous webmasters who support Al-Qaeda’s operations who have demonstrated basic competence in their field. Based on the evidence, that is more than can be said for the operators of UN.org.

I know that Al-Qaeda has a better website than UN.org because — no joke — my 15-year-old son’s MySpace page is a better website than UN.org.

Here’s what you’ll find if you dive into this mess. The most important documents are only available in PDF form — not secure documents, but simple press releases and agenda announcements. This indicates that the site does not have a working web content management system at all. This is bad, but it gets worse: many attempts to download these documents (over, say, my 99/9% reliable cable modem connection) don’t work at all, but instead spin forever, or else they deliver this familiar friend:

I tried many different paths through the multi-lingual, multi-platform and multi-broken website, and found myself looking at .jsp pages, .asp pages (Microsoft began phasing .asp out in favor of .aspx about four years ago), .shtml pages (totally archaic) and many, many custom extensions followed by frightening, endless strings of encoded parameters that clearly were not delivering the right codes.

The only common architectural principle behind most of the paths was that they all ended in sudden crashes. Oh yeah, webcasts are promised, except they often end up looking like this:

Even if the site were not broken in so many places (and maybe I caught it on a bad day), the lack of inspiration behind the technical architecture is staggering. Sure, this problem is an amusing metaphor for the UN’s general lack of effectiveness, but I don’t think we should laugh it off too easily. Digital communication is more than just a metaphor in 2006. It’s a key competency, and UN.org doesn’t have it.

I’m a professional web developer (my work has included PearlJam.com, WordsWithoutBorders.org, LitKicks.com, BobDylan.com and BruceSpringsteen.net) and I am willing to offer my services to the United Nations at a fair price, if they promise to first fire the bozos currently running these pizza boxes, as well as the pencil-pushers who determine the site’s layout and structure. I trust somebody in the organization understands email enough to contact me at levi.asher@gmail.com.