Design and community portals

Community portals should be clean, simple, and easy to use. Jakob Nielsen, one of the top Web usability experts in the country, has a new column out on the importance of good, usable Web sites.

I see too many community portals that make the same mistakes Nielsen outlines.

• Flash animations and splash pages that provide little or no information about what is on the site. Who wants to sit and wait while a pretty picture downloads over a dial-up line, only to have to click to a second page just to do anything? You may love that picture with the panoramic view of the mountains, but it's the wrong thing to put on your home page.
• Overly complex menus and toolbars that offer too many choices to visitors. If you try to list every single thing in your town and every single organization on your home page, it overwhelms people and they often just move to another site.
• Using Web designers who just want to use your money to design a "portfolio" site to help them get their next job. These sites are easy to spot because they are visually busy with lots of widgets, gimmicks, too many drop down and pop up menus, and other eye candy that makes it difficult to navigate.
• Nielsen does not mention this, but I see this all the time--hiring novices to build the community portal. You would never have a junior in high school or a part time hobbyist design a fifty page, color book about your town, but when it comes to Web sites, it happens all the time, with predictable results. We saw the same thing in the early days of Pagemaker--suddenly everyone with a copy of Pagemaker was doing the company newsletter, with predictably ugly results. It's even worse with the Web, since you don't even need a copy of Pagemaker to claim you are an expert. When it comes to qualifications, "I did the site for Cub Scout Pack 238" is not adequate.

Your community portal is how the rest of the world learns about your community. You want to put your best foot forward, so that you attract Knowledge Economy businesses and entrepreneurs who will want your broadband and your great quality of life. If your community Web sites are the very best they can be, you are missing a lot of economic development prospects. Disclaimer: Design Nine helps communities design and develop high quality community and local government portals.