foolfillment: the blog

The website for the town where I grew up and still live when not at uni was recently overhauled. Before it was quite simple layout, easy to navigate and overall it was quite comfortable to use - even though it used frames. The new version though I don’t like.

Now, I do not claim to be a great designer or an expert on how information should be laid out but I am a user and I know what I like, and I find using the new site a chore. It is a user nightmare, which is a shame because it could be, and indeed was, a good tool for promoting the town.

The new site is overloaded with colours and graphics, both big and small; lots and lots of text everywhere, in different columns, with liberal scattering of links to copious amounts of categories of information; my attention gets distracted from everything I try to read; it has stuttery scrolling text; and possibly most heinously of all, text is often blue, sometimes that means it is a link but sometimes not.

Navigation is a scattered affair with no obvious structure, with new areas sprouting from everywhere, each new page is simply another list of links or categories - there is no text or blurb explaining each page, or giving a little human feel to the page, each successive on feels more like a computer generated directory of less thaan useful information. In general the site is just lacking the coherance that it needs. There has been no consideration to how the user uses the internet, what they will be looking for, desire paths are something that should be looked at (via Adrian Sevitz).

The aim of the site I feel should be to promote the town and get people in, to use the shops, see the beaches, enjoy the area, and ultimately spend their money in the town. How are they to be tempted to do that if they cannot find out anything about the town and are turned away by the site. It could quite realistically be the first resource that potential visitors look at to decide where they should go for the day and following that quite probably the last. For instance, try to find out where the town is… go on I dare you.

And now for the positive…
I’m all for the interactivity that the new site provides, little quizes and polls can give a good reflection on what the townspeople are like, as well as being a place that you can wile your hours away if you are bored, there was a lot of written information about the town’s history and things that go on relevant to locals and outsiders alike where is it now?
It may still be there I don’t know - it all needs to be laid out better, more simply and in a more coherant structure. It should be intuitive to find your way from pictures of the castle to where to have a pub lunch near by; it should show new users that there is a lot to find out but without ramming it down their necks.

It is a shame the site is now as poor as it is, I don’t like being negative about things but in this case something has gone from being user-friendly and appropriate to something that resembles 1996 internet sites. Partly why Google stole a march on Yahoo was because of the layout of their first screens (obviously the main thing was the search results) Google have a very clear layout with everything you want and no more, Yahoo have screeds of text, all linked, graphics eveywhere and a page that rolls off the screen - you don’t want to load all of that up over a dial-up when all you want to do is find hotmail.

My biggest two gripes, which I won’t go into, is that you have to be registered and logged in to access a lot of the resources and the random adverts where you are never sure (especially if you are not from the town) if you will be taken to a local business website or whisked away to some multi-national companies website that has little or nore levance to Dunbar.

I’ll leave it at that and let you get your thoughts in, it’s be interesting to see what outsiders think of it. Here it is: Dunbar Community Website

This entry was posted at 4:38 pm on the 20th of May, 2005 and is filed under Design, dunbar things, internet stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.