The creation of a stripped-down, ‘Google-style’ home page for Westminster City Council’s website has received a mixed review from one local government web analyst.
The redesigned site (
http://www.westminster.gov.uk/ )
features a prominent search-engine box – purchased from Google – with different tabs covering ‘services’, ‘maps’, ‘apply’, ‘tell us’ and ‘pay’. The site – built around an open source content management system, Symphony (
http://symphony-cms.com/ ).
also uses Google maps to allow users to pinpoint services and facilities.
John Fox, a reviewer for the Society of IT Management’s annual Better Connected report on all UK council websites, said that although the visual design of the new Westminster site works well, the navigation and search engine do not match up to the full Google equivalents.
“The site design is first-class. The Google-style search box looks inviting, but the additional option tabs weaken the proposition. In theory, if this search box is going to do what it should do, you don’t need extra tabs, and the search results can be very mixed,” Fox said.
“I like the way they’re experimenting, but not everyone wants to use a search to find content, and there is no obvious way into a traditional site navigation until you scroll down to the bottom of the home page.” Fox said the success of the site’s map functions was similarly patchy. “I like the maps, but they’re very frustrating. You can build up very complex maps on the screen, which doesn’t provide a good user-experience.
However David Wilde, Chief Information Officer at Westminster, told E-Government Bulletin that early feedback on the site had been positive. “We’ve gone for simplicity. The general opinion was that the Google-type approach works really well for people, and the feedback we’ve had so far from users is that they’re able to get to what they want to get to inside of a couple of clicks.
“Search technology is so advanced these days, it seemed like the natural way to go. Trying to enforce council structures as a way to get to information isn’t very intuitive to people, because they aren’t going to know how councils set up, and why should they?”, said Wilde.
Wilde said the council will continue to develop the site, moving towards a data ‘mashup’ approach combining council information with content from local community sites and the private sector.
I totally agree with David Wilde that the public aren’t going to know how councils are set up, nor why they should. Absolutely correct.
Any local authority website that is structured to the internal organisation highlights a general lack of understanding of the target audience and is ultimately not going to be successful, regardless of however good the search engine may or may not be.
Further a site structure based on the council internal structure will forever be being reorganised as internal reorganisations take place. Not good news – for either the web team or the website’s regular users!
But a website that is designed wholly with the customer in mind will be straightforward to navigate and will enable the user to find what they’re after easily, and along the way discover other aspects of council services that may be of interest or help – something that the search approach will have difficulty achieving.
I accept that a large percentage of people will navigate a site via its search, but there is still a significant percentage of users who will prefer to use a navigation structure, particularly if they find a search frustrating to use in order to reach the information they want and feel sure must be available on a given site.
I’m personally not a fan of the LGNL since I don’t believe the tenet ‘one size fits all’ can be applied in a local government context, but as a baseline for designing a customer friendly site navigation then it’s a pretty good starter for ten.