Today, the City of Peoria unveiled its much-talked-about new website. Take a look at it and tell me what you think.
My initial thoughts: It looks a lot better than the old one. The RSS feeds are very nice. From a coding standpoint, the Peoria County website is more sophisticated, but the city’s site is still very nice and pretty easy to navigate. It works better in Firefox than the old site.
CJ: I agree — it is a vast improvement over the old website. The translation feature is a nice touch.
I like the look on the top and left side. The pale text in the middle could be darker…easier to see.
It is hard to imagine a less “user-friendly” site than the old one. However, the city I/T department has managed to come through. I use the site mainly to read agendas and meetings for the various city commissions. As an HPC commissioner, I wanted to review some minutes ahead of our Wednesday meeting. After 1/2 hour of searching, I still cannot find them. On the old site they were buried down under City Services/Planning and Growth Management. Where they are hiding now is anyone’s guess! This site may be “prettier”, but from a utilitarian view it is one of the worst I have seen.
I was informed by Councilman Sandberg that the website design was NOT performed by the city I/T department but by an outside consultant. I also received the following clarification from Cathy Roger, the city’s I/T Director:
“…It is my understanding that there is more work to be done and that some
of the departments content has not been moved over to the new site yet.
This work should be completed in the next couple weeks…In the near future City staff will be trained in all departments so that they can manage their content and keep it up-to-date…”
Lots of money going into the new site but it’s still not that user friendly. I have to agree that the County of Peoria has done a much better job of disseminating information through the website than the City.
I’d like to see the City add the following features:
Searchable minutes (so I don’t have to know when a particular item was discussed).
On-line access to released executive session minutes.
Publication of all FOIA responses.
Those items would make access to information much easier.