Apparently, Arcata is responsible for its own tourism website, and, well, it ain’t really up to snuff. 

The city’s tourist-attracting vehicle, VisitArcata.com, currently presents a pretty surface-level overview of what’s worth doing and where’s worth staying. You can probably already guess the included imperatives: Watch a Crabs game! Stay at the Hotel Arcata! Go to the community forest and Moonstone Beach and the Farmers Market! So on and so forth. But it’s a tad out-of-date, and there’s an item on tomorrow’s city council agenda allowing city staff to consider putting out a notice letting design consultants know they can bid on a chance to fix it up. 

The site is “outdated in terms of design, functionality, accessibility, and user experience,” reads a staff report. “Additionally, evolving expectations, integration with social media, and accessibility compliance standards (including ADA requirements) necessitate a comprehensive review and potential modernization of the platform.”

A brief perusal confirms the soundness of that idea. Much of the info on the site is cloistered, difficult to access, and not particularly fetching. Some of it stopped being correct several years ago. (The long-shuttered event venue The Jam earned a few mentions.)

There’s no budget allotted for the site’s maintenance and no time to do it anyway, claims the report; everyone from community members to the city council to city staff to the chamber of commerce wants it revamped. 

An article on the annual lantern floating ceremony, held to remember the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and honor the hundreds of thousands of victims, also exhorts visitors to “spend some time in town and Shop!” before the ceremony, with a link to the site’s page on shopping, which is just a map of members of the Arcata Chamber of Commerce.

The chamber’s executive director, Meredith Maier, told the Outpost that she’d like to go even further and let the chamber run the website. They get calls a few times a day from people interested in visiting , and it’d be easier to have a pretty, well-functioning website to direct them to, one that presents Arcata as an excellent “base camp” to explore the county at large. They already have the staff, the knowledge, and the connections to do it, Maier said. 

“We’d keep it fresh and up-to-date,” Maier said. “…The site, as it is now, is not dynamic, it is not something tourists are obviously going to because we’re the ones that are fielding the calls from people that are coming to town.”

The item is on the consent calendar and will almost certainly pass. If approved, the city is recommending a budget of $25,000 for the project.