Summary

• You can currently find the latest of Brunei Price Controlled Car Prices at
  • the Competition and Consumer Affairs Department page
  • or the Price Control Goods page
  • but if you’re not it seeing it there, it is likely that they have changed things up and you may need to check the Department of Economic Planning and Development website
• #fixBruneiWebsites
  • Let us the community highlight Brunei website issues and tag them on your social media platform of choice
    • Suggest a solution if possible
    • If not, people curious to learn / offer a solution can reply to the post with an answer 🙂
  • Let’s use this as an opportunity to learn and give back to the companies that do have an online presence and let’s make the Brunei web great 🚀

 

The story

Did a Google search for “brunei car prices” which brought up a couple interesting results of actual approved prices for cars

 

It showed that the most recent one was June 2018 but curious as what is the latest version if any. As the results are coming from www.depd.gov.bn, did a search for “brunei car prices depd” and found the Motor Vehicles page

Which doesn’t seem updated since 2016

Dead ends

As the PDFs show that there were more recent ones they had to be somewhere, so digging we go

• The “Home” link on the Motor Vehicles page was a link to similar old page

• Sitemap wasn’t helpful

Success!

More digging around and found the Competition and Consumer Affairs Department page that has the latest list on the right along with other price controlled items such as Cooking Oil and Formulated Powered Milk

There is also the Price Control Goods page which has links to Clay Bricks and Others

And as it turns out it was under “Consumer Affairs” on the Department of Economic Planning and Development home page. In hind site, it makes some sense but isn’t too obvious

 

What can we learn?

So from this I wondered what we could do to learn from this but instead of just complaining, what are the steps we can do to improve this. I have seen a couple websites and in Brunei that don’t seem to emphasise their web presence or just have things set up weirdly and thought it would be great to use these as learning opportunities for the local tech community in general so I’m going try a #fixBruneiWebsites journey

• Let us the people of Brunei highlight website issues and tag them on your social media platform
  • If you can, try to offer possible solutions
  • If you can’t that is ok too 🙂
• Then anybody who’s keen or interested could look up posts with the hashtag and could offer and answer and reply back to the original post
• Take a look at the hashtag on
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
• We can have sessions at BruneiGeekMeet for any new #fixBruneiWebsite issues and discussions

Learning takeaways / solutions for Brunei Car Prices listing

• Have a strategy that allows you to scale
  • While I don’t know the full reasoning why the old page didn’t get updated, it could be that the way it was set up didn’t allow them to make changes easily or locked them into a certain format
  • The old Motor Vehicles page had individual pricing based on car brand. Perhaps it was too much work to break things down and upload individual files
  • There is no current Motor Vehicles page but now it is just a single PDF which helps consolidation and provides simplicity of uploading a single file which is great
• Don’t be afraid to change things up
  • If things didn’t scale well initially, I feel that modifying the old existing page could have been something they did and not just let it go untouched
• Update old pages
  • It could be something as simple as a link to the new current page to allow people to get the latest information
  • Or they could do a permanent 301 redirect or a temporary 302 redirect on the old page so that it automatically redirects to the new one
• If you have a Sitemap make use of it / update it
  • This would be similar to the point above but Sitemaps are even more important compared to regular pages as they are used in SEO and help your page be found by search engines. While this Sitemap was an HTML page and not a XML Sitemap: HTML Sitemaps are still useful with the added bonus that it helps visitors to your site discover more things
• Detail features of sections on a website
  • The “Consumer Affairs” link on the homepage isn’t a super obvious choice that it would lead to prices
  • Perhaps a shot

 

So I hope you come and join me on this #fixBruneiWebsites journey!