Right now, I'm involved in helping our Mayor - Bob Welch - understand our town website and answer the various criticisms that have been levelled against it. I need to post some links for various people on various committees, too, and I've decided to do it here. Some of you won't be very interested in this but others might, so feel free to read on if you want!
There has been quite a bit of discussion about the Church Stretton town website. Is it doing the job? What job is it supposed to be doing anyway?
Most towns now have some sort of presence on the web. Here are some links to other towns’ websites. I've been browsing around to see what I like and don’t like about them.
Shropshire Town sites include Ludlow, Bishop’s Castle, Clun, Wem, Ellesmere, Market Drayton.
There’s a large range here. Some towns have town council sites. These in turn may include tourist information or may just list council facilities or events or may not even be complete. Ludlow has lots of information and looks quite upbeat, but it’s still a bit “busy” for my taste.
Yorkshire Towns: Why Yorkshire? I’ve just spent time in Skipton at the Action for Market Towns Conference and was impressed that North Yorkshire is doing a lot to promote its towns and tourism. Skipton, for instance, has two sites: one from the council and one from a local web design firm, whereas Ilkley has a comprehensive but amateurish-looking site. Here’s Hebden Bridge’s site.
Lots of towns have sites run by the borough council. Here’s Tamworth’s. It’s quite typical. In fact, as I look at town sites on the web, I find many of them have very similar structures. I wonder if they are following some template that I could find out there somewhere. Nuneaton and Bedworth follow the same typical pattern.
The thing about many of these sites is that they have to do everything for the town/borough council. Tourism is just a tiny part of it. These sites are dealing with everything from benefits to transport, from dead animal removal to adult education. It’s no wonder that the tourism stuff gets buried in all the other stuff.
On the other hand, you can just chuck a lot of stuff on a page and get a bit of a mess. Looe in Cornwall has a website like that!
Here’s a newly re-vamped web site that looks promising - Telscombe in East Sussex. It looks as though it isn’t completely ready for prime time, but the design is fresh and exiting.
Some other good sites that I have come across:
- Alcester in Warwickshire - a bit busy, but something about the site hums with activity and draws you in.
- Seaford in East Sussex - a clean, fresh looking website
- Hythe in Hampshire - this is the place that did the snow machine thing last Christmas.
I’ve just come across a web design firm that can make a cheap website from a template. They are Spider solutions. They have designed websites for several towns including Diss, Wymondham and Thetford. All the websites are similar - obviously put together as one template and then just the colours and copy changed from town to town. At the bottom of any one of the sites, you can find links to all the others.
Having seen all these sites, I’m underimpressed. I think our site is on the right track and covers most of the salient points. There are problems, however. One is the home page, which is dull and busy. Another is difficulty of navigation. For some reason I can’t find my way to the pages I want, when I want them. A third problem is copy. Unfortunately, that is a universal problem and not limited to the Church Stretton Web Site. How do we get people to contribute information? How do we make it easy for them to submit it on-line? How do we get it up and displayed in a timely manner?
Does anyone have any ideas?
