Does anyone besides me find the City of Mpls web site the most screwed up mess on the internet? It seems like it is designed to make things impossible to find. My current quest is to find out who are the members of the planning commission. I am sure someone will come up with a perfectly logical link like 'architectural students whose names start with p', but the whole thing stinks. Unless you're looking for some info the city really has to supply because another site already does, like property info, the site is inadequate, outdated and totally confusing. Maybe it's just me, in which case I'm sure one of you will tell me. By the way, wasn't our mayor supposed to be gung ho on computer technology? How much does it cost to keep a user friendly site up to date and if the city can't, then dump it and save money.
As a professional web site developer, I find the City web site to be incredibly annoying. It's difficult to find anything but the few things they've chosen to lsit on the front page. It *looks* attractive enough, and they clearly spent good money on the graphics and arrangement of shapes and text on the page. I wouldn't call it out-dated, at all. The current design is not their first and is not more than a couple of years old, if I recall correctly.
No, they just plain designed a poorly organized site. The people who designed and constructed it appear to not to have followed many of the rules of thumb for good design, ignoring the end user's needs.
It need not cost a fortune or even a small fortune to keep a site up to date. In fact, the City site is quite up to date, at least in the parts I've looked at. It's just darn near impossible to find what one is looking for in the first place.
Chris Johnson Fulton
TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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