Manchester City Council
manchester.gov.uk
Manchester City Council
1–10 of 234 posts
Re: Manchester City Council
#2Re: Manchester City Council
#3It looks lovely. But it's hard to find things. Consequently it's not how a government website should be designed.
Try finding, for example, the cost of a planning application. It's a few clicks away from the home page, which is fine given that it's reasonably logical if you can spot the initial starting point on the homepage ... but the search is poor. For the terms "cost of planning", a link to http://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/200074/planning/5865/plann... is hidden at the 6th result in a page of links that's essentially a wall of text. Search results are likely to be a very important part of a large data driven site, so they should be much better.
Re: Manchester City Council
#4I think this takes mobile first a bit too far. On my desktop with a high resolution this feels a bit odd. That said, it's really refreshing to see government sites properly designed and UX and mobile friendly.
Re: Manchester City Council
#5It looks lovely. But it's hard to find things. Consequently it's not how a government website should be designed. Try finding, for example, the cost of a planning application. It's a few clicks away from the home page, which is fine given that it's reasonably logical if you can spot the initial starting point on the homepage ... but the search is poor. For the terms "cost of planning", a link to http://www.manchester…
If you search for "cost of planning application" it's on the first result - in the context of a council website "cost of planning" could mean lots of things (e.g. how much do they spend on managing planning across the entire organisation).
Re: Manchester City Council
#6I personally think the redesigned site for my county (Wake County, NC) is far, far superior. It looks nice -- not quite as "modern startup" as the Manchester site -- but is so much easier to use.
Re: Manchester City Council
#7I'm sure everyone else is aware of how local government websites look in their own parts of the world - but for a similar-sized UK city Edinburgh City Council's website is a good (i.e. bad) example for comparison: http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk
Re: Manchester City Council
#8I personally think the redesigned site for my county (Wake County, NC) is far, far superior. It looks nice -- not quite as "modern startup" as the Manchester site -- but is so much easier to use. http://www.wakegov.com/
I'm not a big fan of the huge menus, but every time I've had to use the Wake site I've been able to find what I need pretty quickly.
One improvement would be an auto-complete feature on the main search box, but I think I'm in a pretty small minority that would benefit from that.
Re: Manchester City Council
#9I'm sure everyone else is aware of how local government websites look in their own parts of the world - but for a similar-sized UK city Edinburgh City Council's website is a good (i.e. bad) example for comparison: http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk
That actually looks like a domain holding page when you glance at it...
My http://glasgow.gov.uk isn't any better
Re: Manchester City Council
#10I love some of the new gov sites. Yes, there are some problems, but compared to the god-awful mess we had before they're amazing.
It's important to have good machines for development. But I wonder how many people have terrible machines for testing.
As for local government: Here's an example. Gloucestershire (http://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/resident) - imagine you want to report a child at risk. The search gives you useful results, but also sends you to the Safeguarding children website. (http://www.gscb.org.uk/)
The Gloucestershire site is good[1] and the GSCB site is terrible.
[1] for some values of good, including 'you should have seen it a few years ago'.