Our city has budgeted $125,000 for an overhaul of its current website and hoping for that price it will include an expanded scope in services. As someone experienced in constructing enterprise-level websites, I decided to see what the existing site offered.
If Holmes On Homes had a TV show on websites, I think the Vernon.ca site would be on it. Frankly, the current site makes our city look bad. Thankfully, in the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing some improvements to it. The last I looked, services like Bizpal were broken, and some of the services are not described (web inquiry tax search). Strange, cartoon-like icons appear throughout the site and only by clicking on them could I figure out what they meant. For example, instead of a clearly worded contact numbers, a very stylized flip phone is used. Visually, the site is cluttered and confusing.
I dug deep into the site and ran a number of analytical tools. Most pages on the site are downloadable PDF documents communicating news, bylaws, minutes, and the various expected activities of the city. There is a clunky online-payment system for bills and fines. There’s a really old business license search that takes a painfully long time to return basic information, without links that would help promote Vernon businesses and aid people in their efforts to contact businesses. There are a number of image galleries that outline community events and upgrades, but without text describing what the images show. There is a community calendar, but no iCal address shown, which would allow people to automatically grab the calendar feed and pump it into their Google, Outlook or other calendar program.
On the positive side, city staff are utilizing Twitter to send timely updates on events, issues, and information important to Vernon citizens. Facebook is being used, but appears not to be promoted sufficiently for many people to have liked it. I loved the map section, which had numerous layers one could explore.
Here are two quick, general recommendations for any website. In the last five years, user experience testing, also called UX, is expanding rapidly in this industry. As websites are developed, they are continually tested with people who will use the site, especially with persons with access limitations, such as seniors with limited technological experience, persons with limited education, and cognitively impaired persons. If these folks can successfully use the website, then typical persons will likely be able to as well.
Second, at the leading edge of website design, especially for government, is the plain language movement, which seeks to simplify the written word to its most comprehensible forms.
For example, from the Vernon.ca RCMP page:
“The Vernon detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is committed to finding shared solutions to the problems of crime and disorder that concern our residents. Grow operations continue to be an issue in our community and we are concerned about the use of marijuana and other drugs among our young people.”
In plain language:
“The Vernon police (RCMP) works together with residents to reduce crime. We are very concerned about marijuana (pot) growing and young people using drugs.”
As a writer and lover of the English language myself, I understand that some might decry this as dumbing down language.
The purpose, however, of a city website is to help people achieve their goals, not to pontificate on the resplendence of the English language.
My general recommendations for the city’s current web needs could be achieved for 50 per cent of the proposed budget if WordPress was used to construct the site and staff trained to update information.
If that option is not flexible enough for the city’s design needs, using a web framework (like Laravel, CakePHP or Yii) could quickly meet the current and expanding needs of the city’s website, with API’s free or low-cost plug-in features like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Calendar, etc.
In non-geek speak, unless the City of Vernon is intending to expand the scope of the current website significantly, I can’t imagine it costing $125,000.
James A. Love
Vernon
