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?