Town first on the ‘net in N.S. municipal website overhaul
BY SARA KEDDY
Kings County Register
A website isn’t anything new - well, not for most of the members of a co-op ready to launch the first in a series of revamped municipal sites this week.
“Some didn’t have them,” admits Bob Ashley, Berwick chief administrative officer and the chairman of a provincial co-op of municipal units working on a common website design.
“A lot of us - especially the smaller ones, with no IT department - shipped them out originally and the sites were one-offs, quickly out-of-date with nobody to maintain them.
“This is just way better.”
The municipalities - 14 in all - teamed up almost five years ago and came up with an early template for municipal information, contacts and calendars, but Ashley says there was a recognized need “to try and increase public engagement” - and bring municipal websites “into the 21st Century.”
In the last year or so, the co-op searched out web designers as far as British Columbia and then hired a project staffer and combined resources with Service Nova Scotia and the Association of Municipal Administrators.
The results - a Joomla-based, cutting edge content management system - is ready to go for the first two units, Berwick and Argyle.
“I’m enthusiastic about this - I was out over the holidays in the snow taking pictures of the town to put up,” Ashley says.
The website should be live January 17, and the pictures newsy briefs and town contact information Ashley had been busy pre-loading will nit the ‘net.
“I want people calling me, I’m inviting suggestions for content - and criticism,” he says, but he’s looking to the future potential for town videos, polls local advertising and a discussion site on local issues he can monitor for feedback to council itself.
The site will also allow visitors to submit their own community information and events, and it will be “simple enough municipal staff will be able” to add new information on their own, in-house. It will also track visitors - like where they’re from and what they’re looking at.
“We had a problem, and we’ve found a system,” Ashley says. We’ve got a waiting list already beyond the 14 original co-op members of units who want to use it and, once they see what we’ve done, there will be even more.”
WEBLINKS:
www.berwicknovascotia.com
New Berwick Website
Ivan SmithArticle online since January 20th 2008
It's great to see local government starting to take the modern WWW seriously. This new Berwick website looks pretty good, and it works reasonably well.
First, link appearance: The decision to use commonly-accepted methods to display links is welcome. Berwick's links look familiar to anyone who uses the WWW. Too many government website designers choose to mess up the links. (One recent glaring example is the new Democracy250 website http://www.democracy250.ca/ that displays obscure links, using non-standard colours, no underlining, and fails to differentiate between unvisited and visited links. If they had tried to make their links user-unfriendly thy could not have done a better job). Berwick's new website is a textbook example of the right way to display links, while Democracy250 provides a textbook example of absolutely the wrong way. Another example of how not to do links is found at the Destination Southwest Nova Scotia http://www.destinationsouthwestnova.com/ website, where a remarkable variety of bad website design features is on display.
Second, link placement: Berwick's links are right there in the text, easy for all to see.
Third: Many websites use small images embedded in text. This is a recognized and effective way to associate images with text. However, many websites fail to offer larger images for those viewers who may want to get a better look at an image that is of interest. Berwick gets it right, by telling the viewer that a larger image is easily available: "Click on thumbnail to enlarge photo". When the viewer clicks on the thumbnail, a new window opens with a reasonably-sized image. For example, in "The New Fire Hall Team", a suitable thumbnail image (195 by 108 pixels) is displayed within the article text, and the same image but larger (about 800 by 450 pixels, which makes good use of the screen area available in most computer systems now in use by Nova Scotians) is available for those who want to see a better view).
Fourth: Berwick's larger images work with an ordinary browser as is, without requiring the viewer to download and install special proprietary software. Contrast this with Destination Southwest Nova Scotia, which curtly tells me that my computer does not meet their requirements and they won't allow me to see their images. Berwick's website design is much smarter, much more user-friendly, than that offered by Destination Southwest Nova Scotia.
Fifth: Berwick displays the larger image complete with an adequate caption, a welcome but far-too-rare feature.
Berwick does not get everything right, but they are far ahead of other government website designs. Every month, I look at 200 or 300 websites, many of them designed and operated by government departments or agencies. I have not seen any that offer serious competition to the new Berwick website, for user-friendliness and overall good design. May this example be studied by all those who design websites for governments, federal or provincial or municipal.
Great work, Berwick.