Ballymena Council and Fermanagh Council websites have been listed among the worst in the UK by government website comparison company, Site Morse. At the same time Belfast and North Down Councils rank among the elite of the 450+ local council sites compared.
Site Morse ranks sites on over 400 technical criteria. What they can’t tell is the relevancy of the content to the reader. After spending a couple of hours poking around the best and worst council sites, it appears that the councils that have put the effort into getting a technically attuned website have also put the effort into creating a customer focused site.
Take the navigation of the Ballymena Council website for example:
No - I didn't cut out their logo. There isn't one on the site!
The top line navigation includes ‘News’ which is the same as the home page, ‘Council Projects’ which was last updated in 2007 and ‘Print Page’. Who on earth looks in the navigation when they want to print a page?
Their sub-navigation starts with ‘Corporate Documents’, the council ‘History’ and includes information about councillors and their committee structure.
These are all areas of interest for councillors but not necessarily the public they serve. If for example, a member of the public wants to know when their bin is due for collection, that information is not available on the website. This website is self-serving. It is made for the councillors, not the citizen.
Now take a look at Belfast City Council, some 40 miles from Ballymena. This website is subservient. It is made for the customer, in this case the citizens of Belfast.
In this site, the City Council has established what areas are popular with their citizens and has brought them to the fore. They understand the need for advice and have featured this in the main navigation and central areas of the page.
Subservient architecture built around the reader, not the site owner
The ‘Council’ tab on the Belfast City Council website gives lots of details on how the council can work for the citizen.
What Belfast Council can do for you
The Ballymena equivalent has photos of the councillors.
Ballymena Councillors
A subservient website is created when the marketing team shows leadership. They push back on ideas that are not customer-centric and say “no” when the content is not relevant to the majority. A self-serving website is created when the marketer is under pressure to do the bidding of their peers.
