How Search Engine Marketing Helps Business Grow!
May 1, 2022
Your constituents have high hopes. They want on-demand access to news, information, resources, and self-service tools that will allow them to live comfortable and engaged lives in your community. You, too, have high expectations, and they all revolve around providing your citizens with what they want—and more. Your municipal website should serve as the foundation of your citizen engagement strategy. The problem is that, despite the best intentions, creating the types of digital experiences that citizens want can be difficult.
GovTech is a research firm that focuses on the role of information technology in state and municipal governments. Take the time before your next website makeover to learn from GovTech's research and avoid the most prevalent mistakes in government website design.
To begin, it is worth emphasizing that government agencies are certainly capable of creating excellent websites. For example, the city of Boston redesigned its website to make it more accessible and user-friendly. The city improved its support for hosting content in multiple languages as part of its upgrades, and it updated its back-end hosting to create a faster, more responsive site. As a result, a modern site was created to meet the needs of a diverse group of residents and businesses. Most government agencies, however, do not have the same level of budget or resources as Boston. Lot of agencies must build websites with limited staff and resources, which makes it more difficult to create a successful website, but it is still possible.
The first error that some governments make is to disregard their own guidelines and norms. Government agencies and public authorities frequently make grandiose pledges to construct safe, user-friendly websites, only to back down when faced with the day-to-day realities of maintaining them. Many cities, for example, struggle to create citizen-centric websites where content is structured around user requirements rather than agency needs. As a consequence, when consumers seek up information on city parks, garbage collection, and transportation, they encounter discrepancies because each of these tasks is often managed by a distinct agency. The remedy here is increased accountability, such that government entities have explicit performance standards for their websites and are held accountable if these benchmarks are not met.
The second mistake some governments make is ignoring best practices from the private sector. While some governments commit to security standards or accessibility guidelines — possibly at higher rates than the private sector — they tend to overlook best practices on design and performance. For example, relatively few government agencies commit to fast page load times or ensuring mobile-friendly Web design even though these are some of the most important metrics for the average commercial website. But user expectations are based on what people are used to, and so the public sector needs to ensure that its websites do not fall behind those of the private sector. To do this, governments should regularly update their website design guidelines to ensure they are adopting best practices from the private sector
The third mistake some governments make is that they keep websites around long past their expiration date. After all, many government websites are quite good — for their age. But technology changes very quickly and websites must keep up with this pace of change. However, not enough agencies treat their websites as they would any other asset and recognize that it has a finite life cycle and will need replacing. The result is that websites stick around well past when they should have been retired or refreshed. Better management of digital assets can avoid this problem.
In short, government agencies can improve their online presence by developing stronger accountability, learning from the private sector, and better managing the life cycle of websites. Not every agency is going to win an award for Web design, but even if they are not all striving to be the best, they should all be striving to do better. Websites continue to be one of the most important ways that individuals and businesses interact with government, and so agencies should be committed to facilitating this communication as part of their mission.
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