Advice on Designing a Government Website

In this day and age, every organization needs a website, at the very least one that provides hours of service, location, and contact info. To truly take advantage of this digital age, an organization’s website should be responsive to users and regularly updated. While the City of Little Falls has a good basic website, the site is not terribly responsive to citizens. I left a comment on the Citizen Comments & Suggestions page and never heard a word back. It’s as though my comment was sucked into a black hole.

I have also suggested to City staff that they set up an email newsletter of upcoming meetings that citizens could subscribe to only to be met with, “We don’t have time for that.” I even offered to help them set up the system, which would take very little time to manage because the City already has a typed list of all its upcoming monthly meetings and citizens would sign up themselves. (To see what such a system could look like, visit the City of St. Cloud’s Notify Me page. The Little Falls system could be much simpler.)

I ran across an article on Medium regarding the State of New York’s redesign of its website NY.gov. The article is called “How to Design for Everybody.” The most important take-away for me is that government websites are there to serve every citizen, not just a special group of users.