Philip
Kinkopf
Professor
Dan Martin
ENC
4416
5
August 2016
Rhetorical Website Audit for Sanfordfl.gov
INTRODUCTION
Sanfordfl.gov is a large, city run
website that features a high volume of information and web services related to
the City of Sanford. The site’s audience is mainly citizens of the city seeking
to complete some type of official task, such as filling out a service request
or signing up for waste services, or anyone seeking information about the City
of Sanford. That being the case, the site needs to be targeted at users who
will want to get in, complete a task, and get out. The site must be clear from
clutter and clearly and easily point users to the specific page they are there
to access. Since this is such a large site, the homepage should act as a
central hub of information about the website, leading users down specific paths
to specific pages. As someone who chose this website having no previous
experience with it, and since I’m a citizen of the City of Sanford, I’m a good
subject to test the usability, ease of access and findability, and overall
effectiveness of this site.
METHODOLOGY
A
best practices assessment looks at content from an outsider’s point of view and
measures content against best practices and user needs (Halvorson 53). This is
the assessment approach used in this web audit.
Since
this website seems massive, the first step in the methodology was to get an
accurate count of how large it really is. Home to more than 7700 actual pages
and about 200 listed page on the site map, it was difficult to grasp the scale
of this site in any sort of tangible way. The results of this measurement reveal
one very obvious fact: that the site is big. And it probably doesn’t need to
be, and could benefit from being broken up into other smaller department sites,
reducing the overall size of the menus and streamlining the site as a whole. The
revelation of that many pages being housed on this site is an important step in
the methodology of this audit. It reveals to me that this page has become a depository
for almost every link and piece of information about the city and its operation.
This is likely why there are so many pages and links on this one website, and why
there has been a failure to effectively curate such a massive volume of content.
The second step in assessment was to
compare this site to some of the more successful government websites and find
out what is lacking on Sanfordfl.gov. Cityoforlando.net has a much cleaner
interface, less clutter, and a superior search function. The Sacramento County,
California website (sacounty.net) has menu tabs that are simple with titles
that make it easy to find out where you need to go for certain information.
Finally, with insights from Halverson’s table of qualitative audit factors,
findability, actionability, and ease of access were all analyzed by attempting
to perform certain tasks that would be common for a citizen using this website
as a service tool or a source of information.
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
Design
and Layout. Sanfordfl.gov is laid out in a fairly cluttered way. The
homepage is dominated by a slideshow of photos of the city, which is visually
appealing but not helpful to new users. There are four main drop down menus to
the right of the “home” button, which isn’t a drop down menu but is the same
exact style as the other four, which is confusing. There is a search bar, which
offers no popular search suggestions, at the top of the home page. This top
portion of the home page with the menus and the search bar is present wherever
you go on the site, which is helpful. There is a large photo as the background
of the site, which isn’t really necessary and adds to the overall cluttered
feeling of the site. This site is not terribly appealing visually. The fonts on
the homepage vary and don’t convey consistency, and the concept of Sanford as a
brand is not really presented here. The “Our Vision” statement for the City of
Sanford is placed at the bottom of the homepage, which seems like it would be
more important than to be relegated to the bottom of the page. There is some
disclaimer information on the bottom of the site, and when you visit certain
pages of the site this text bleeds over to left. This looks like a design flaw
in the coding of the website, and appears unprofessional.
This site could much better represent the beauty of Sanford in a
cleaner, more visual way than it currently tries to with a better design direction.
“Web pages that have a consistent visual look convey a stronger sense of
cohesive presence and credibility” (Barnes 195), so this site should be more
visually consistent in order to display its credibility as a local government
website.
Usability.
The
main use of this site is to serve citizens who have objectives for coming to
the site (finding information, finding a phone number, filling out and
submitting a form online, downloading public documents, etc.) and to provide
news about the City of Sanford to the public. An important aspect of any
successful website is navigation (Halvorson 120). Some of the answers visitors
may be looking for can be easily found in the “How Do I?…” drop down menu on
the homepage. This menu is static, so it stays with you wherever you go on the
site. What’s helpful about this menu is that it seeks to assist in helping
visitors tackle some of the most common tasks that they come to the site to do.
This menu helps you find out what you need to know without having to use the
search bar, as do the other menus, with varied success. Unless you are using
the menus primarily, it’s not very easy to find what you need on the site.
These drop down menus provide lots of options and submenus, which can be
confusing and overwhelming if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.
The pages with lots of text provide a built in
text magnifier, print button, and are easily shareable to social media as a
link with the share function. The font is small on most of these pages,
however, and the text is compressed into the center of the site foreground, and
due to the large background photo there is wasted space in the margins of the
site. There is a useful events calendar, with links to more information about a
scheduled event on the calendar itself, which is convenient. The search bar
doesn’t provide very helpful results when searching for specific concepts or
tasks, but rather displays keywords from all the site pages instead of sorting
the search results by relevance or popularity. This can be frustrating. There
are links to social media, but they are relegated to the bottom right of the homepage
and not clearly present as they are on so many legitimate websites today. The
usability of this site is functional, but improvements could be made.
ANALYSIS OF FINDINGS
The lack of visual consistency, the dense
volume of menu categories, and the difficulty in finding certain basic
documents and information are just a few of the problems I faced in my
interactions with this website. The site looks dense and complex from the
outset, and according to Garrett, this is bad news for the user. “Websites are
complicated pieces of technology, and something funny happens when people have
trouble using complicated pieces of technology: they blame themselves” (Garrett
27). This view of user experience from the perspective of the user is key to
making an easily accessible website that doesn’t frustrate users.
Analyzing this website from a rhetorical
perspective and for best practices, it’s clear that there are some improvements
that could be made. The site is achieving its goals of providing services and
information to the public, but it is not presenting this content in a clean,
concise way that makes the experience of working with the website and its
content as easy as possible. Users should not have to analyze and think too
hard about how a website works, or how to navigate it. “...As far as humanly
possible, when I look at a Web page it should be self-evident. Obvious.
Self-explanatory. I should be able to “get it”- what it is and how to use it-
without expending any effort thinking about it” (Krug 11). This isn’t a website
where users expect to have fun or have a good experience buying a product, but
it is a service oriented website, so the ease of use should be as
straightforward as possible. It’s in the City of Sanford’s best interest to
make this site as easy to use and unintimidating as possible for its citizens.
Ease of use and navigation are of primary focus
in this analysis, and here are some of the main concerns regarding the way the
site functions:
- It isn’t
always easy to find important content on the website due to the densely
populated menus and submenus.
- The site is not very appealing visually, due to the
wasted space in the margins because of the large background photo, and this
compressed center where the content is presented makes the font smaller
than it has to be, reducing readability.
- The home page has a slideshow of photos which is front
and center and is the first thing that catches a first time visitor’s eye,
but this does not serve to help with site navigation or convey a message
but rather adds clutter to the homepage. A slideshow of images could
easily be relegated to its own dedicated page on the site.
- The department submenus are too large, and finding the
right page for specific information is daunting.
- The search function is limited, and not very intuitive.
It provides only the results of keywords searched for, and does not
suggest popular inquiries or provide advanced search parameters.
- The “How Do I?...” menu is useful, but could be made
more user friendly (like the Sacramento website).
- The drop down menu tabs on the homepage extend further
than the length of the screen and require superfluous scrolling to fully
view.
- When hovering over the drop down menu tabs on the homepage,
they do not immediately disappear from the main view and impede the user's
access to the rest of the site.
- Important links such as contact and employment
information are split between the top and bottom of the page, making it
more difficult for the user to locate what they are searching for.
- The “in the
spotlight” sidebar, located at the top right of the homepage includes
links to events that are over two months outdated from June 14, 2016.
Compared to other city and government websites,
Sanfordfl.gov is not the best it could be. Other sites with similar design
goals offer a cleaner, more visually appealing and professional presentation of
content, menus that are easier to navigate, and more intuitive search
capabilities. Although all of the content necessary is present on this site,
it’s organization and presentation is far from flawless. As a citizen of the
city, and as someone who has not dealt with this website before, I represent
the large majority of those who would be coming to this site looking to get
information quickly and easily, and the lack of sophistication on this site is
disappointing.
Recommendations. Some of the following
recommendations could be easily implemented into the infrastructure of the site
without much difficulty. Using other, more successful government websites
as a guide to creating a great user serving, visually appealing website, the
City of Sanford website could be much better. My main recommendations for the
goals of this site are simple:
Focus on creating a clean, concise, and user
friendly environment.
These goals could be achieved by updating some
of the site’s core tools.
Condensing the menus and topics
could greatly increase the ease with which certain departments, subjects and
pages are found. Arkansas.gov presents its menus on the homepage categorized by
the three types of audiences it anticipates: parents, citizens, and business
owners. A helpful content analysis question Barnes asks is “are goals
articulated for the different sections and pages of the site?” (196). The
Arkansas website understands its audience and clearly displays what type of
user should go to which menu. This could be a great benefit to the Sanford
website, which could ask a new visitor “are you a: Visitor, Citizen, Business
owner?”. By beginning the website visit with a filtering tool, the user could
be sent much more easily and quickly to where they need to go.
The search menu for Sanfordfl.gov is not very
helpful, and is not intuitive. The Sacramento website has a search page that
lets you edit your search inquiry, suggests related documents, and allows you
to modify your search results by update time. The Sanford website has no
customizable search settings, so finding a page requires some luck by guessing
which keywords to use in the search. I would recommend redesigning the search
function to provide more customizable search parameters, as well as organizing
search results with the most relevant and popular results showing up first.
The main slideshow is an example of a missed
opportunity to create a visually appealing homepage. Some images, such as those
of the local farmer's market, could be explained with a short sentence and link
to a page with more information to Sanford’s local events and traditions. The
background photo should be removed, that way the site could have more space in
the margins and look natural, similar to Sacramento’s simple color scheme and
geometric design. There should be a clear visual hierarchy on the first page
(Barnes 196). This could be achieved by a more condensed menu and submenu list,
like the Sacramento site, that uses the wideness of the page on the screen to
present the information listed in a simple, non-confusing manner.
The volume of the content
could be condensed significantly on this site, making the pages smaller and easier
to access. My recommendation to accomplish this would be to create shorter and
more concise drop down menus, eliminating links that could be put into
subcategories. Instead of including each link individually, linking to
categorically separated subpages including a list of links related to that
category would make the site more concise. For example, when hovering over the
“About Sanford” tab, there is a subpage link leading to things to see and do in
Sanford. The main drop down menu also includes separate links to multiple
things to see and do, such as the farmers market, that are already included on
the subpage. By removing the additional direct link to the farmers market, and
only leaving the links to the subpages, the drop down menus could be simplified
and decreased in size by at least half. This is a reoccurring problem, with the
same link appearing multiple times and adding to the clutter and volume of the
site. Shortening the length of the menus would also eliminate the problem of
the drop down menus not disappearing once you scroll off of them. By cutting
down the size of the drop down menus, the user’s access to the rest of the site
less restricted and the drop down menus would be easier to navigate away from.
The links could be cleaned up in order to ensure that none are out of date
especially those appearing on the homepage, such as those appearing in the “in
the spotlight” section. The important links including contact information and
employment opportunities could be removed from the header sidebar and included
with the rest of the important links in the footer bar as to clean up the
appearance of the site and create one cohesive location for important links.
Another recommendation to
simplify the layout would be housing the main navigational tabs on the left-hand
side of the site instead of keeping them all at the top, making a clear
partition between the navigational aspect of the site and the main area where
the content is centered. “Regardless of whether we’re talking about liquid or
fixed-width layout design, the left-column navigation format is a time-honored
standard... a layout featuring left-column navigation is a safe choice for most
projects” (Beaird 28).
Finally, the social media and
external resources should be quickly accessible for anyone visiting the site
who wants to be redirected to where they actually need to be. A social media
icon section, like the one used on the Orlando City website, would be
preferable and much more noticeable.
The City of Sanford website
has great potential, and as the examples I have show have proven, it is
possible to create a large government site that is visually appealing and easily
accessible to the average user. One of the key elements of a successful website
is that it has the ability to fulfill its user’s needs (Halvorson 6). Since it
is possible for a government website to do this while provide large volumes of useful
content to citizens who need it, the city of Sanford could provide a much
better user experience and more productive website by implementing some of the recommendations
in this audit and by following more closely the principles of successful web
design.
Works Cited
Barnes, Susan B. An Introduction to Visual
Communication: From Cave Art to Second Life. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.
Print.
Beaird, Jason. The Principles of Beautiful Web
Design. Collingwood, Australia: SitePoint Pty., 2007. Web. 2 Aug. 2016.
Garrett, Jesse James. The Elements of User
Experience: User-centered Design for the Web and beyond. Berkeley, CA: New
Riders, 2011. Web. 1 Aug. 2016.
Halvorson, Kristina, and Melissa Rach. Content Strategy for the Web. Berkeley, CA:
New Riders, 2012. Print.
Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common
Sense Approach to Web Usability. Berkeley, Calif: New Riders Pub., 2006.
Web. 1 Aug. 2016.
The Official Website of the City Beautiful. Cityoforlando.net.
Accessed 3 Aug. 2016.
The Official Website of the State of Arkansas. Arkansas.gov.
Accessed 4 Aug. 2016.
Sacramento County, California.
Saccounty.net. Accessed 4 Aug. 2016
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