New City of Port Phillip council Website - a step backward ?

The biggest problem of the new site is that it tries to be far too simple and fails as a result. 

Everything on the new Port Phillip comes in threes.  This is the way the design has been laid out.  There are only 3 main menu items.  At first it looks a bit more Web2.0, but then you start to notice the massive flaws in the approach. 

The homepage is a bit disfunctional, but ok.  There are multiple clashing types of news and events and multiple quicklink sections vying for attention and some of the Port Phillip network sites are duplicates of the Quicklinks.

Bundling everything into "Council", "Local" and "Discover" is ambitious (with the rest bundled into "Quick Access") and basing the whole design around this was always going to be ambitious.

It is in each section though that the problems and limitations of such a condensed menu design becomes obvious. 

There are inconsistencies in the navigation that I find hard to believe would pass a basic card sorting exercise (see my blog on Information Architecture for Websites).  As either a resident or visitor, I find it hard to see anyone using the "Discover" section - it sounds too much like a tourist brochure, yet the primary role of the website is for locals and on first glance the website doesn't appear to offer anything to tourist.  The number of business related quicklinks highlights the neglect of this important council function.  Each section is accompanied by a rather banal "Welcome to the _____ Section" message.

Anomalies also abound.  To highlight this, I found "Pets & Animals" inthe "People & Groups" section - I know some pets look a bit like their owners, but this is taking anthropomorphism just a little too far I think.  Do I look in "Council" or "Local" for "Roads & Traffic" - in the old site it was straightforward - now difficult decisions like this force me to use the search far too often.  In each of the sections, there is a catchall such as "Local Resources" that fails to -well - catch anything.  Each of the links in each subsection is far too long.  For many of them, they push 10 links, which is just far too many.  The quicklinks in each section also appear as afterthoughts and get completely lost.  This is because you never know when to look there and this makes the site very difficult to navigate for users.

The navigation is not consistent either.  There is a different menu style for each of the 4 levels of the site and the heirarchy is not capable of anything more than 4 levels deep without further confusion.

Even the feedback forms on the right attempt an anti-spam check without telling me why it is asking me "What is the third month of the year?".  If I didn't know what a CAPTCHA was I'd be thinking "huh ? did I miss something here ?"

It is obvious that the designers wanted images to stand out more and to have more images.  Yet on many pages, images are frustratingly repeated for no reason.  It is also obvious that the designers have put more effort into abstracting the council logo to create colour coded sections of the website than to think about how colours and images might actually complement the website experience or provide any link to the area's identity beyond the council's corporate logo.  Page images aside - to mine the look and feel lacks people friendliness and appears unwelcoming, cold, harsh and corporate.

Then there is the plethora of blank pages which greets you as you navigate sections of the website that indicate that the site does not have an effective system in place for managing content.  I found a plethora of pages like this one that are just plain annoying.  Others like forms are obviously framed so that they contain no context of where they are situated on the site ensuring that users get lost and confused at every turn.

While the aspiration of the information architecture can be admired -put simply it is horrendous and it is obvious that it was left to designers rather than information architects.

Finally, apart from the information architecture and usability issues of the site, there is another significant issue.  It is not accessible.  I ran it through a number of basic accessibility tests and they all failed.  This is another reason that the site appears to have been built by designers.  Disabled users of the site would be quite disappointed in this.  There aren't even any access keys.  Superficial gimmicks such as increasing and decreasing text size doesn't cut it.

In fact the website appears to show a complete disregard to government recommendations and requirements not just in terms of accessibility, but also discoverability.  There is barely a single metatag on any page - that's right - not so much as a description.  Recommended government metadata standards have been completely ignored.  In fact all pages of the site share the same generic title which means that the site is bound to underperform with Internet search engines such as Google.  Technically the site is of a shocking standard in that it isn't even valid HTML !

In summary I think Port Phillip have made a major mistake with their new website.  I've never seen a website so in need of another redesign so quickly after launch.

What I would have loved to see is better navigation, such as a superfooter or mini sitemap, more social networking such as links to Facebook groups, YouTube etc.

Sad thing for us as bystanders is that our company put our services forward to do a quality job but were not even invited to tender.

Anyhow stay tuned for a new look Boroondara and Wyndham website by Datalink, from what I have seen so far, they promise the next step in council websites.

I'm interested to know what others think of the new Port Phillip site, so if you have any experience or comments, please post them below ...

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