Warrensburg's Sesquicentennial celebration has kicked off and will last the whole year. In addition to the official events sponsored by the official committee, many other groups are participating with their own events. An official website has been established to list the events and other information connected with the sesquicentennial.

The website, www.visitwarrensburg.org, was established by the using cooperative marketing funds from the Missouri Division of Tourism based on a project submitted by the Greater Warrensburg Area Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center. Quite frankly, it's a disappointment - at best.

The first (and worst) thing I noticed was that for those with dial-up internet connections, the page takes forever to load. Three minutes is the internet equivalent of a decade; people will not wait that long to see a web page. The reason the site takes so long is the pictures were improperly resized, a rather basic function for website designers. Had the pictures been handled properly, just one of the pictures would have loaded in 10 seconds rather than 2 minutes!

Another problem was that the links to internal pages don't work in alternative web browsers; we're stuck with using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (the one that all the worms and viruses are written for). There is a schedule of events, but it lacks information about the events or links to the websites of organizations, such as the Blind Boone Park group, that sponsor events. Those problems are not as serious as the lack of any effort to optimize the site for the search engines, so people looking for the site will have to find it by other means.

Most of this discussion has been rather technical, but here's why it affects all of us: taxpayer money was used to create this site. And trust me, it was wasted.