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Article:
Seven Ways to Make Your
Municipal Website Successful
Michigan Municipal Review, April, 1998

Michigan cities are developing web sites at a torrid pace. Taking a quick tour of these site show a broad range of quality. To help cities that are considering the development of their town’s web site, we came up with seven suggestions that will help you in designing and developing an effective web site.

Design the home page for impact,
but don’t forget its utility

The home page is probably the most important page on your site. Often called the "splash page", it creates that important first impression with visitors to the site. The home page should be aesthetically pleasing, should reflect the culture and flavor of your city or village, and should set the theme for every page in the site.

The best home pages combine nice graphics and/or photographs with a well-thought-out table of contents, all available without the need to scroll down the page. Some sites make the mistake of putting too much information on the home page. They might include a greeting from the mayor, a directory of city hall phone numbers and a list of upcoming events. A better approach is to put this content on appropriate pages within the site; an event calendar, a mayor’s page or a city directory page, and make sure that they are easy to find.

Be careful of dark backgrounds or photos with dark areas

One city in Michigan chose a beautiful picture of a lake in their community as the background for their home page. The links to different areas of the site were text that was placed over an area of blue water in the picture. Browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator assign a certain color to text links that have and have not been visited, but also allow the user to customize these colors. My colors were set to medium blue and navy blue in my browser, so that once we visited a page, we could no longer see the link on the home page. It blended into the blue water making it impossible to read.

There are several ways to avoid this problem on your city’s web site.

1. First, you can use a plain white or light textured background. This will keep you safe when your citizens change their browser’s default text colors.
2. You can explicitly state what color visited and non-visited links when you program your site. Colors that you specify will override the setting that visitors to your site have specified in their browser.
3. The surest way to avoid the problems is to turn all of your text links into images. Visitors cannot change the colors of your images. This will slightly increase the download time for the page though, so keep these buttons small.

One of the best features of the Internet as a communication tool is the simplicity of moving through large volumes of information with ease. But some sites seem to want to make it difficult to get where you want to go quickly. By following a few suggestions, you can make navigation around your site much easier.

First, put links to each major section of your site on every page. A municipal site will usually have a half dozen major sections, such as City Government and City Services. You will obviously have a link button or image on your home page to each of these sections, but it's simple to have a banner across the top of every page within your site that links back to each subsection. That way, if your citizens are checking out the latest public safety announcement in the police department page in the City Services section, they can, with a single click, get to the City Government section to check the latest council minutes.

Oh, by the way, be careful of how you emphasize words in text areas of your site. The convention that browser software uses for identifying text hyperlinks is to underline the text. Some web developers like to underline words for emphasis, but this will create some confusion for users of your site. Rather than using underlining to emphasize text, use italics, bolding, or a different point size.

A quick look at Michigan municipal web sites reveals that most cities, villages and townships are not letting their citizens take advantage of a very powerful feature of the Internet: interaction. Although several city sites allow for email or feedback forms, very few have automated services such as permits, parks and recreation registration or payment of utility bills.

Conducting business from your web site can add considerable complexity. To allow full-function online permitting, you will need to develop the appropriate interface between your in-house permitting system and the web server where your website is hosted. Online utility payments will require that electronic commerce capability be added to your web server. To have parks and recreation registration available online, extensive programming will be required. Despite these additional challenges, automating city business on your web site is a worthwhile goal. These capabilities will ensure that citizens and businesses get the most value from your city’s investment in the Internet.

This is more difficult for municipalities than it might seem. While most commercial sites change infrequently, think of how many things change throughout the year in your city, village or county. Of course, your council and commissions meet frequently, so there is a lot of news generated there. As the seasons change, your streets department will want to update information on plowing, leaf collection, brush pickup or other seasonal information. Every election that takes place will require information on polling places, voting procedures and, of course, the candidates. Keeping the site up to date is a challenge that should be planned before you even put your site together.

One way to make certain that your entire site stays up to date is to put a "last reviewed" date at the bottom of every page on the site. Then, assign responsibility for reviewing sections of the site to appropriate people around city hall. If your city is using a site management product like Microsoft Frontpage, the process of reviewing the page will automatically update the "last reviewed" date. Seeing recent review dates on pages will give visitors to your site confidence that the information is accurate and up-to-date.

Keeping content up-to-date is critical to the success of a municipal web site. Your citizens will expect that they can get the latest information from your web site and will stop visiting the site if the information becomes dated.

Market your site

Many cities go through the considerable effort of developing their website but neglect to aggressively promote the site. Most sites are marketed appropriately within the city, through newsletters, cable TV programming or special announcements. However, the sites are difficult to find for those searching on the web. A marketing plan for the web should consist of two aspects.

First, register your site at search engines and site directories. Although there are now over 500 directories on the Internet, many are for special interest websites. By hitting the top 10 search engines/directories you will make it simple for people to find your web site.

Second, search out the special interest directories that list city/village web sites in Michigan and in the U.S. It is important to be listed on these sites because there are no official directories of city sites on the Internet. When companies are looking for locations in Michigan, they usually stumble across these special interest directory sites … It’s not easy to find these directories, but for your convenience, we’ve listed a few at our website at www.muniweb.com.

Have you ever wondered how many constituents read your city's newsletter? You might have a feel for it based on surveys or feedback forms, but it’s hard to tell just how many eyeballs your website is reaching. This is an area where the Internet has a strong advantage over printed publications. Through the use of log analysis software, your web site hosting company can tell you a great deal about the traffic that your web site is generating. This information usually includes the number of people who have seen each page, how much time is spent on each page, and how visitors traverse through your site.

How can you use this information? Some cities use this data to help guide their efforts at maintaining the site. If nobody is visiting the calendar of events, you can scale back efforts at putting information into the calendar. If nobody is looking at your economic development pages, you can put more effort into marketing those pages at other Internet sites. Another great use of site statistics is to help "advertise" your site within your site. If your most popular page is the Parks and Recreation site where you list the league scores and schedules, put a link at the top of that page to promote other pages in the site.

When I speak to municipal organizations, I am often asked "Are enough people using the Internet so that it makes sense for us to develop a municipal web site?" I prefer to turn that question around and ask "How many more people will regularly access the Internet if they know they can more easily participate in their local government?"

Steps that you are taking this year to create an effective Internet presence will pay great dividends in the future as the Internet becomes the primary means for two way communication in the next century.

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