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Manchester City Council

manchester.gov.uk

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Re: Manchester City Council

#131

Post by EGreg »

DigitalSea wrote: post #70

I applaud the change and thinking outside of the box, but the Manchester City Council website looks like a $45 Wordpress theme off of Themeforest. The slider appears to offer no value to the site other than taking up a massive amount of room without really justifying its existence. I'm not a designer, I'm a developer and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind that slider. While I agree that the trendy loo…

Why don't governments design sites with multiple themes for multiple targets? And speaking of being accessible ... why do their sites have so much small text? No, I think government agencies could make better use of fonts and sizes, at least.

Re: Manchester City Council

#132

Post by yen223 »

yashodhan wrote: post #62
goyalpulkit wrote: post #23

I am really amazed how most of the comments assume that beautiful sites cannot provide the same amount of information as their uglier counterparts.

Most beautiful sites can. This one does not. Those icons are confusing. Click expand to see the whole list together. What a mess! Ideally they should be using glyphs with much bolder lines, or if they're really set on using the current ones, place each on a solid white circle. Right now they blend in with the text and seem to add to the overall visual noise. Scrolling down the page, why the hell am I looking at a gig…

Seriously disagree with your analysis. I have a 24" monitor, and this is one of the few websites that makes excellent use of all that real-estate. I found that the icons are large, relatively clear and straightforward in meaning, making it much easier to hunt for content than if you were to visit the other single-column, text-heavy websites.

I would hold GOV.UK as a site that's too minimalist. A person could be forgiven for thinking the gov.uk domain is still up for sale.

Re: Manchester City Council

#135

Post by Xylakant »

talkingquickly wrote: post #84
DigitalSea wrote: post #70

I applaud the change and thinking outside of the box, but the Manchester City Council website looks like a $45 Wordpress theme off of Themeforest. The slider appears to offer no value to the site other than taking up a massive amount of room without really justifying its existence. I'm not a designer, I'm a developer and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind that slider. While I agree that the trendy loo…

I'd agree with you on the slider not being a good use of space. But I'd argue that it does get some other things right which a lot of uk government sites fail on. In particular the simple presentation of the primary services people access with the option to expand out for other less frequently used ones. This is a huge improvement on, for example http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/home.htm I have to use that site quite regula…

Giving it a cursory look [1] it seems they score pretty ok on accessibility:

They use a proper content structure with appropriate headline levels, buttons are large enough for people that can't use a mouse properly. The contrast in the default color scheme looks fine and they provide a high-contrast color scheme. They even offer to switch the font to accomodate dyslexics, but fail to include a dyslexic font[2]. The layout falls apart a little if you use the high contrast scheme with large letter-spacing and comic sans, but it still includes all functions, so that's forgiven.

The fact they don't provide alt-tags for all images is totally fine: The images are just visual add-ons to the links that are provided directly underneath the images, so any screen reader will pick up the links and not the images. Quite to the contrary, providing empty alt-tags as they do will hide the images from screen reader and will remove mental clutter. The "always add alt-tags" mantra is - as so many matras in the web design world - wrong when taken at face value.

Forms are designed well with proper placeholders and labels.

Now, there's much more to accessibility than this - for example the writing style and text complexity, but it's obvious they have given accessibility more than a passing thought and taken it into consideration. One thing is certain however: Accessibility is not a roadblock for good design.

[1] Please note that this is only the 10-minute-tick-the-most-important-boxes check :)

[2] maybe for legal reasons, including dyslexic fonts is a legal nightmare with two warring factions

Re: Manchester City Council

#136

Post by alan_cx »

smcl wrote: post #7

I'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

Much prefer that one. Straight away I can see where to navigate to what I want, and I am not misdirected by the so called style. That nasty flat modern monstrosity that is the Manchester site is like a child's templated wet dream.

Re: Manchester City Council

#137

Post by thinkersilver »

edbloom wrote: post #88
DigitalSea wrote: post #70

I applaud the change and thinking outside of the box, but the Manchester City Council website looks like a $45 Wordpress theme off of Themeforest. The slider appears to offer no value to the site other than taking up a massive amount of room without really justifying its existence. I'm not a designer, I'm a developer and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind that slider. While I agree that the trendy loo…

couldn't disagree more. Underneath the "frosting" of the design surface of this site is one of the best user experiences I've had on a government website in a long long time. As someone who is in the middle of building out a large government site at the moment I'm keenly aware of how hard it must have been to bring the Manchester council team along with their design and ux decisions. For me this is the real triumph o…

I agree. It is easy to complain about how boostrappy or wordpress like the theme is, but it is immaterial the source of the design inspiration. The most import thing is, that it works and is functional. Try going to the birmingham.gov.uk or london.gov.uk or any of the boroughs in London and see how much of an improvement this approach actually is.

Re: Manchester City Council

#140

Post by tobydownton »

thinkersilver wrote: post #137
edbloom wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

couldn't disagree more. Underneath the "frosting" of the design surface of this site is one of the best user experiences I've had on a government website in a long long time. As someone who is in the middle of building out a large government site at the moment I'm keenly aware of how hard it must have been to bring the Manchester council team along with their design and ux decisions. For me this is the real triumph o…

I agree. It is easy to complain about how boostrappy or wordpress like the theme is, but it is immaterial the source of the design inspiration. The most import thing is, that it works and is functional. Try going to the birmingham.gov.uk or london.gov.uk or any of the boroughs in London and see how much of an improvement this approach actually is.

I just started as a BA at Westminster, currently working on customer journeys and user stories, redesigned website and content to follow early next year....watch this space...!
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