The worst council website I have ever seen

I’ve been doing this job now for what feels like an awfully long time. As I’ve said before, sometimes I get cranky having to have the same conversations with people about issues I really thought we had all resolved in 2008 or something – but generally, I try to be calm and measured, and – frankly – glad of the work.

But today I came across a council website so gob-smackingly awful, it almost made me want to throw in the towel, and go and do something else with my life. Because if there are genuinely people in this sector, running these critical organisations, who think this drek is acceptable in this day and age, I wonder why I, and all the people who work so hard to make things better, bother in the first place.

I won’t name the council, am not interested in any kind of singling out, and I am quite aware that there are usually reasons for things being the way they are – and I don’t want to make people feel bad. What I do want to do is highlight the fact that local people around the country are being horribly let down by a system that allows organisations that clearly have NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING to carry on in this way.

Just some of the lowlights:

• Prominent, utterly irrelevant Google ads at the top of the home page. GOOGLE ADS!!!! 🤮
• Prominent links to popular services using words that have no relation whatsoever to the thing they are linking to – the worst example being “Public Access” which links to information about planning
• Linking to a “my account” style thing, which only gives access to a tiny number of quite niche services, and which immediately drops the “my account” branding as soon as you’ve opened it. Am I in the my account thing? Have I ended up somewhere else? I have no idea.
• Inside said my account portal thing, there’s a menu option called Menu, which when you click on it, does nothing
• Really basic design flaws, like sections of the site being misaligned, boxes in a grid being different sizes, random fonts, hideous hover effects on links, and so on
• A whole section dedicated to (even) more services, where again the language used bears little to no relation to the actual things real people might want to actually achieve, and what’s more, is actively confusing to the user.
• Loads of links throughout the site saying things like “You can find X here.” etc
• Some pages are just lists of loads of PDFs, full of content that nobody could be bothered to turn into accessible web pages that are actually readable on a phone.

Like I said, I really don’t want to make anyone feel bad. But someone somewhere must think this is ok – and it isn’t. Whose job is it to point this out to them? I feel really bad for the people in the team that has to keep this thing going – because there is no way they can be being supported by the powers that be.

And how can we as a sector support improvement across the board so those left behind in this way can catch up? Because it isn’t like the internet isn’t chock full of guidance on how to avoid disasters like this.