Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...!
What is a BA?
Business Analyst
Manchester City Council
211–220 of 234 posts
Re: Manchester City Council
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
changing it was a bad decision IMO. Without the context this submission makes no sense at all.
Yes, the title changing has gotten seriously out of hand lately. I don't get it either, it's not like the original title was confusing (unlike the new title).
I was thinking the same. Could a mod elaborate on this please?
Re: Manchester City Council
#213While in general I approve of the policy here of renaming posts to match the title of the page, the change here done by the mods (to simply "Manchester City Council") makes the whole discussion make no sense. (The original title was "How government sites should be designed".)
This wouldn't have happened if the original submission had followed the site guidelines[1]: > If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead. I view it as similar to Wikipedia's "no original research" policy. [1]: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If we're gonna follow the guidelines, then the Boston bombing was entirely off-topic and should have been removed immediately instead of getting thousands of points. The only Boston-related on-topic story was Bruce Schneier's view on it, which is also the reason why the other stories should not have been on HN.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Edit: Well that was a quick downvote. Guess the Boston bombing strikes a nerve. But is it so hard to be objective about it?
Re: Manchester City Council
#214Try to keep things in perspective - for a government site it is truly impressive. The usability should be the most important issue and in that category I Manchester did a bang up job. I'm impressed - and no framework it appears, the css is custom then?
Re: Manchester City Council
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Web Developer common sense rule #1 — Always put alt tags on images, especially when they're being used as icons in content sections, wow. Actually, no. The icons are correctly labeled with text and many of the images are CSS background images (which can't have ALT text anyway.) In their usage, a screen reader would sound out the text on screen, providing a user with enough information to make a browsing decision. E…
More importantly they've got a section specifically for accessibility. Well done. http://www.manchester.gov.uk/accessibility/settings
If your link to the accessibility settings is in such a tiny font size there is a fair chance those that need it won't see it.
Re: Manchester City Council
#216No. Goverment web sites should be minimal design & content - black text on white background, no extra graphics. I don't want to pay taxes so that these latte-sipping designers can create cool projects.
Says the guy who thought "cooking recipes as Gantt charts" was a good idea: http://kangasbros.fi/visual-cookbook/
Re: Manchester City Council
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a predictable top comment for a Hacker News thread. :( A government website showcases a design that is leaps and bounds ahead of any other government site we can think of , and HN's top comment casually dismisses it. To rewrite something you said: "This is the perfect example of everything wrong with [HN comments]." I, for one, am floored that someone in city government was able to rise above the bureaucracy and…
It's a shame you're being downvoted, hopefully constructive feed back will eventually bubble to the top. There was a similar submission yesterday where this occurred. Clearly there are a group of elite web designers, UI and UX specialists that parade this site, who, unsurprisingly, have empty profiles. How else are we supposed to see their portfolio of exceptional work so we know what to aspire to?
Art/Creative Directors often have some of the worst, if existent at all, portfolios. Execution has nothing to do with having an eye for it.
This layout might look more modern than the 1998 frames we were expecting, but from a usability standpoint, it's still weak. If your average government site has a lefthand sidebar that contains all of the navigation, that in itself is better than making your user move their eyes all over the page, forcing them to click on a button to even see the rest of the options available. On top of that, they don't look like links (they don't even have a hover state), which is frustrating enough for me, but could be entirely too confusing for average users.
Additionally, that large image is useless; the "View more services" should be visible without needing to click into it.
Re: Manchester City Council
#218This changing the title thing really needs to stop. This title is completely useless to spur the discussion that the original one did.
Re: Manchester City Council
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're 3 clicks deep (having searched around a bit, I guess) and you still don't have a number...
That's not too bad for an information-dense site. You've not had many page loads. Plus, you can find it very easily by putting "council tax band" into the search box.
Maybe you think "very easily", but I searched around for 10 minutes unable to find the numerical information required. I had concluded it didn't exist in tabulated form, so thanks for confirming I was wrong - although I'm still not sure if this is accessible via natural links.
Here's a particularly unhelpful FAQ, which says the data is "displayed on our web pages" http://www.manchester.gov.uk/faqs/faq/19013/what_can_i_do_if...
What I find bad about that - is that I know my way around a website, and I couldn't find the required information. I found it with ease on other council website suggested in the comments (Lambeth, Gateshead, Birmingham: all 2-3 links deep)
If we want people to look for information on the web rather than blocking council call centres: this website is not the right way.
Re: Manchester City Council
#220I 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…
"The images don't even have alt tags on them, Web Developer common sense rule #1 — Always put alt tags on images"
I think you mean 'alt attribute'. Alternative text is provided via an attribute on an img's tag, not as a tag in its own right.