New City of Tacoma website online

The City of Tacoma just launched their new website. The seemingly never finished former site is no longer having been replaced with an improved setup. The site is clean and seems to offer solid content and links to resources around town. Although there aren't any RSS feeds of any events or news information other enhancements are welcome. Consistency comes to mind since now most of the City and its related sites seem to now fall under the same design and style. The search is a nice addition but may need some optimization considering a search for "pet license" yielded links to business license info, the about us page, and a FAQ page. The "Our City" section is also lacking since I would expect this to be more of a page to generate interest for tourists or anyone looking to move to town. More pics here might help urge that on.

Anyway, it's pretty good but I don't think I'll use it for much more than looking up a phone number here and there. The events calendar is the only section I might consider visiting more often but only if it lists more than council meeting dates.

That's my constructive criticism. What's yours?

Comments (8) | To Top

5/31/2006 @ 12:16pm

I would like to give our friends at BISC.com a friendly pat on the back. Good Job! I just wish they would care more about W3C web standards and web site accessibility. Though, if the client doesn't care why should they?

by Richard Ryan Anderson

5/31/2006 @ 1:14pm

The site does look good but standards matter for searchability and accessability. I tried to up the font size using Firefox and the text changed but none of the layout adjusted as well. Too bad it was done it uber-proprietary ASP.net -- it's a shame so many gov't orgs can't get away from suckling at M$ teets.

by KevinFreitas

5/31/2006 @ 1:21pm

I tend to look at City websites for the usability from a designer's perspective. In looking around Tacoma's site, I found it amazingly easy to locate design information, the City's standards, and required maps needed for preliminary design. I guess it's too bad I'm not designing up in Washington! Maybe some Central Oregon towns could take note on this website!!

by Mandy

5/31/2006 @ 1:40pm

...Or you could, perhaps, join us in living here in this great city! Just and idea...

5/31/2006 @ 3:22pm

note to tacoma web designers: just say "no" to using tables for layout (it is a mean thing to do to people with screen readers). Where is the love?

5/31/2006 @ 3:54pm

Agreed -- tables = bad and this site has it in spades. I'm also not a big fan of the right-side navigation and breakdown of link levels with the lines and arrows. The right nav is contrary to what most users are accustomed to and the lines and arrows are just messy.

6/1/2006 @ 3:38pm

The main page has 4 distinct link areas: top right of the header, the sidebar, the "Online Services" footer, and the "I want to..." in the body. It seems like everything should be in one navigation area rather than scattered around like that. Yes, I know those last two are not continued on future pages, so they might not count, but if they are important enough to be on the front page links, why are they buried 4-clicks deep on the sidebar?

Anyway, to get sort of off topic, what would your choice be over ASP.net? (Not defending it, just wondering PHP/Ruby/straight HTML/something else?)

by Marshall

6/1/2006 @ 3:42pm

I work primarily in PHP at home and at work. I'm big on open source and really appreciate the community surrounding PHP. For me it's about diversifying certain aspects of an organization or business away from using solely Microsoft products. I think, rather than making life more difficult, it forces cross-software and platform standards so differing products can work with one another.

That's a long-winded way of saying "don't put all your [technology] eggs in one basket."

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