Durham NH Town Website

[aschulz90]

Hi, I've been working for the webmaster at the town of durham, designing php pages for subscribing to the list server and reporting clogged storm Drains etc. My boss wants a more intuitive interface but I have gotten so used to how it works it seems to make plenty of sence to me, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated (here is the URL of the page):

 

http://ci.durham.nh.us

[proggR]

The goods:

The lighter blue background when you hover over the buttons in the navbar at the top works well with it.

 

The bads:

The links on the right are very washed out since they are white on such a light background. It seems to only render that way in FF though, IE6 looks right for a change.

Try using a wrapper and keeping everything in the center so that the information is closer together. Having the content stretch so far makes it less comfortable to read and leaves a lot of white space when pictures are center aligned.

Also try to cut the navigation down to the top navbar and one vertical navbar on either the right or the left of the content. Very seldom to 3 column layouts work and in this case I think it splits your focus and makes it more akward.

 

Other than that try new color schemes or something with the appearance but those should help with the layout and making it more "intuitive".

[KevinM1]

Hi, I've been working for the webmaster at the town of durham, designing php pages for subscribing to the list server and reporting clogged storm Drains etc. My boss wants a more intuitive interface but I have gotten so used to how it works it seems to make plenty of sence to me, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated (here is the URL of the page):

 

http://ci.durham.nh.us

 

Sweet, another NH resident.  I'm an UNH alum, so I'm pretty familiar with Durham.

 

Let's see...

 

Unfortunately, I think the site needs a lot of work.  I'll list my issues with it from the top-down.

 

1. The header images don't blend well.  You have the wagon in sunset separated from the rest of the header image.  It stands out, and not in a good way.

2. You can probably reduce the redundancy in the header image.  Official Website for the Town of Durham, NH would suffice.

3. The text in the header image looks a bit pixelated.  Not good.

4. The main header image hides the white border separating the entire header from the navigation.  Is this intentional?

5. The horizontal navigation text looks blurry.

6. You should label the left-hand navigation.  It's a bit confusing as you have the mailing list button in the same block as the rest of that navigation.

7. In the left-hand navigation, you should separate the text links from the image links.  At the very least, put a black (or white) border between the two groups.

8. The main content area is a bit haphazard.  I suggest having three blocks - one for News, one for Events, and one for Features - all the same size, lined up next to one another.  Limit the entries of each to 5 or so, with a link at the bottom of each block pointing to older entries.  That way, the user won't have to scroll as far to read pertinent info.

9. In the right-hand navigation, the 'i want to...' text is blurry.

10. Is there any point for the 'i' image?  It looks like it should be clickable.

11. The 'Town Council' and 'Administrator' blocks look out of place.

12. It's a bad idea to remove a link's underline during a mouseover.  You should do it the other way around - no underline until the user mouses over the link.

 

Note: all of these items are from me using IE, which is what most of your users will use when visiting your site.

 

All in all, I think that the majority of the criticism I have is based on how the site's info is organized.  Having three areas of navigation seems like overkill to me.  I think you'd be well served by re-examining how your site info is chunked and how that info relates with other parts of the site.  I think having a drop-down menu system would work wonders.  You could have something like:

government v
Town Council >> Council Members
                Meeting Minutes
                Next Meeting Agenda

 

Group items that belong to the same category together, and give the user as much navigational freedom as possible, so they don't have to click through several layers of information hierarchy just to get to what they want.