Earlier today at a very dry City Hall press conference, Mayor McGinn and Bill Schrier, the city's Chief Technology Officer, unveiled the new Seattle.gov website. Here (click to enlarge) is a screenshot of the old website from last night:
- Here's the top of the home page...
- ...and here's the bottom of the home page.
By just about any metric, the new home page is way better. (Be warned: The site isn't loading correctly on older versions of Firefox.) It's clean, it's simple, and it does a better job of getting information across to the viewer. The site still has the same old bugs—the neighborhood map feature is still super-twitchy, especially when compared to Google Maps—but the new design, at least, doesn't contribute to the bugginess with visual overload. (And because the city budget is such a big issue, Schrier made a point to accentuate the cost of the new site. Aside from a usability study, performed by Knowledge As Power for "under $1000," Schrier said the other non-city-employee costs of the new site were donated from various sources.)
A few sites have been added: Data.Seattle.gov is an information hub, Recovery.Seattle.gov tracks the use of Federal stimulus cash, and GrowSeattle.com has information for small business owners. There will be more additions in weeks and months to come. Aside from a discussion forum and an ask-the-City Officials, the primary addition is a social networking function called My.Seattle.Gov because, as Schrier says, "social networking has come to the fore these days." (My.Seattle is still in development and so I haven't seen it, but I'm really skeptical about whether Seattle needs to run a social networking site.)
Schrier says the Seattle.gov site is the portal to more than 150,000 city webpages, and it will take up to two years to convert them all to the new, cleaner format. (Two years! We'll probably be snorting website powder into our sinuses in two years!) And there still is no plan to create a mobile Seattle.gov site, though Schrier noted an "urgent need" for one. I'd prefer to see the city put precedence on both of those suggestions—speeding up the conversion and getting Seattle.gov mobile-ready—before embarking on any kind of social networking strategy.
