City of Raleigh Finally Redesigns Their Website
If you are even the slightest bit web savvy and have also tried to navigate the City of Raleigh’s website in the past few years, you are sure to know that it was a bit of a headache. The city has tried to alleviate much of this by redesigning their homepage and trying to make it more simple to navigate to find the information you are looking for. Decide for yourself. They’ve also added social networking options and other (almost) up-to-date web features, like a link to RSS feeds (finally! but it still doesn’t work).
City staff is eager to get feedback from users. A survey has been placed on the home page seeking users’ evaluation of the site. Feedback on the new portal also is welcome at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
There’s even a guide video to show you how to jump around the site:
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Rob E.
08/02 12:23 PM
Wow. I can drill down and get an actual, readable, reasonable link instead of some bizarre query string. Way to go, Raleigh!
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Kurt Schlatzer, Web Consultant
08/02 02:34 PM
FAIL.
Aesthetically speaking, it’s a minor improvement, but I have to give them a grade of F for usability. They’ve turned a semi-useful information site into a brochure. I doubt any of the new design decisions were based on usability. It looks more like the monkey-see-monkey-do approach to design.
Where is the secondary navigation? Am I supposed to watch the stupid slideshow at the top of each section until I see what I’m looking for? What user testing and research led to that decision? How about a menu?
Once again, they failed to follow the basic rule of design: Form follows function. If you need to publish a video to show your visitors how to use your new design, you’ve already failed miserably.
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Phil B
08/02 02:40 PM
What Kurt said.
Pretty busy layout. Seems like they went for flashiness over simplicity. -
arthurb3
08/02 03:03 PM
Its real purdy but I can’t find anything now!!
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Ann
08/02 08:27 PM
I tried my hardest to find the hours of operation for Pullen Aquatic Center, but couldn’t find this information anywhere on this new site. All it gives me is the location, phone number, and photo of the place. Gee, thanks. This info was easily found on the old site.
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ct
08/02 09:37 PM
First reaction: not as bad as the old site, but not great by any means.
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Van Alston
08/02 10:47 PM
Wow. You actually got the info for Pullen Park. I’m impressed. I spent five minutes searching for the phone number to a different park and never could find it. I finally ended up using an old phone book I had here at the house.
I don’t mind all the flashiness, but there is significantly less information available than there was last week.
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DPK
08/03 04:29 AM
At first I didn’t think it was all that bad, but then as a test I decided to look for something I knew used to be there only using mouse clicking.
That quickly failed and I resorted to using the search box, which also failed. I typed in “Pullen Park” and hit enter which dropped me to a blank page telling me to “enter my query in the search box”. I just did that you crazy website.
Indeed it appears they went for “pretty” instead of anything useful. Web design fail. -
DPK
08/03 04:34 AM
...and I just got an “internal error” when trying to use the feedback form. Wow. Fails all around.
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ncmyk
08/03 12:48 PM
don’t bother with the feedback, dpk.
the city asked for feedback on changing their permit process. the feedback indicated that the building permit process was fine, but the site permit process was broken.
so what did the city do? reorganize the building permit process under the site permit department.
if it ain’t broke, the city didn’t try hard enough.
i guess updating their website was politically easier than updating their police headquarters.
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Kurt Schlatzer
08/03 03:11 PM
Send your comments to the folks who own the disaster:
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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Knave
08/03 06:14 PM
My favorite new feature is the push poll on the right hand side:
What do you think about the new City Web Portal?
Select one:
I think it looks great!
It looks good, but I will need time to learn it.
I will miss the old site.The only option for any negative feelings not-so-subtly tries to inject the idea that it’s really just you being averse to change.
Where’s the option for “Just as bad as the old site”?
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Ashe
08/08 09:01 PM
The new site isn’t “as bad as the old site”, it is actually much worse because you now can’t even find things by using Google! I tried to look up the finalized Raleigh 2030 Comprehensive Plan and the Comprehensive Bicycle Plan through Google. I was sent to the front page of the new website instead of the actual locations of those PDF files! I did eventually find the Comprehenive Plan, but I couldn’t find the Bicycle Plan at all!
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Unique1
08/21 11:12 PM
I didn’t think they could make it worst. I was wrong
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Kurt
02/08 03:49 PM
UPDATE: The city paid $800,000 for the site make-over!
NBC-17 has picked up the story:
http://www2.nbc17.com/news/2011/feb/07/raleigh-getting-complaints-about-city-web-site-ar-763175/
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