My hometown City of Tampa just re-launched their website today so thought I’d write a little review.
Pros
-Love the new big focus on search and key terms up top
-Love how we’ve moved from just a series of links to highlighting the top key areas
-Love the background image showing the beauty of tampa – I hope they change this over time to highlight the best Tampa has to offer
-Digging the interactive components like the interactive maps
Cons
-We still have the world URL ever – tampagov.net. Seriously it sounds like a bad 1999 web company. Bite the bullet and make the change – it should be tampa.gov. Or could be cityoftampa.org
-Font feels amateurish – I’m not a font guru but something about the font (is it Arial) just makes it feel like an amateur website
-Favicon in nav bar looks lame
-I would spend more time highlighting alerts – as you see in sites like whitehouse.gov, email and alerts are still the item citizens most likely to sign up for
-I know lawyers often say you need to do this but I really hate when I click on a website and then it says “you are now leaving the city of tampa website, click here if you want to leave” – it’s 2012, we don’t need that any more
Overall – Pretty cool to see City of Tampa make a step in the right direction. It looks way better and much easier to find what you need. Still some tweeks left but most are easy to do
What’s your take?
Wherever that scene is, I want to be there right now. That URL really is awful, not sure when gov’t websites first started going online but I imagine it’s an ancient domain name. As you said, very 90’s. I like that they have social icons in a prominent position on the homepage, but I agree that they shouldn’t be on the nav bar.