http://www.calgary.ca/

The move garnered positive response from the country’s national newspaper:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/digital-culture/ivor-tossell/more-complexity-demands-greater-simplicity/article2147167/

Cheers.

Nick

my point is, all these are contained under one overarching banner of ‘bbc.co.uk’, but the way they are held under that banner the content the user wishes to find is (for the most part) easy to find, with other content not interfering with it.

so, yes, we indeed *should* be creating top-tasks-focussed sites, so that the 20% of content 80% of users want is easy to find, without the remaining 80% of the content interfering with that. my suggestion is that the best way of also making the other 80% of important content easy to find for the remaining 20% of important users is not to try to keep the entire site’s content constrained within a single one-size-fits-all site with a single global navigation and single global site design, but to break it off into properly segmented microsites. of course there needs to be a way for web users to find all these microsites – that’s what the home page is for!

1. Throw a website together, it’s got on it whatever you already had.
2. Make a large website (2000+ pages) which is difficult to use, but comprehensive.
3. Make a somewhat usable, large and comprehensive website.
4. Make a very usable, smaller site (<1000 pages) that still covers the vast majority of things.

The first is what LAs had in the 90's and early 2000s, and the rest is a natural progression, but it takes more effort to create a smaller site that is still comprehensive.

The last is the most effective, but it takes a lot of effort to concisely cover everything you should.

I get the impression that LAs would be going back to square 1, without the effort needed to make it useful and usable.

SOCITM are holding an event in London tomorrow to discuss Top Tasks so I’ll be following that with interest.

I am in favour of a model which gives ‘top tasks’/transactional stuff homepage priority but also provides a well-signposted, navigable repository (I like the Wikipedia model for ‘static’ pages and think it could work) – built around LGNL but with expanded and enhanced metadata taxonomies – to assist councils in categorizing information – the ‘long tail’.

I am currently plotting a mock up to this end using Drupal.

Regarding your example of not finding the word ‘deaf’ on a site: Do you think this could be classed as discrimination?

Knowing bureaucracies, perhaps a search on “hearing impairment” might have returned a hit ;)

The BBC managed to work out how to create sites within sites and make it work – floating content off into different sites is just a giant leap backwards.

That the (majority of) CMS vendors cannot work out how to make poly-hierarchical menus in the LGNL fashion does not mean that body of work should be dissed out of hand.

Making a “Top tasks” site is wrong thinking .. being clever enough to associate top tasks with each ones inevitable “long tail” infrastructure is the challenge.

And the key to that challenge is metadata – that is what can magically glue all of this stuff together and automate the linking, automate the searching and automate menu associations.

If the driver for removing content is that it is too costly to maintain the links to it, then let me tell you – you are doing it wrong.

If the driver for removing content is that it gets out of date, then again – you are doing it wrong – if you have static documents containing variables like prices, times, people, telephone numbers – then I repeat, you have been doing it wrong.

Isolate what changes from what stays the same.

That is the challenge that LG CMS vendors are largely unable to rise to, sadly this is mostly the fault of those that are responsible for drawing up the specs – so instead of looking for proper fit for purpose Local Government solutions – we peek about looking for saviours.

Now, let those who want to follow the Socitm pied piper do so – it will all end it tears – do you remember having to make a text only version of your site? Remember the bonus points that Socitm used to dole out for doing so? Then the mysterious volte-face the following year?

This ‘focus only on top tasks’ has the same childish smell about it in my book, lets all run over and look through the … round window.

I think where council websites have gone wrong is they’ve basically followed a steady expansion path since they were first set up 10+ plus years ago, all diligently following the lgnl at least in spirit if not in fact and become so cumbersome that they’re not much use to anybody, whether pothole reporter *or* obscure policy seeker. What’s needed is a complete abandonment of the one-size-one-site-fits-all mentality, and the sites being broken up. By all means, have a site dedicated to the so-called top tasks – but also have a site dedicated to the needs of business and partners, a site dedicated to the needs of families and children, a site focussed on getting around, on leisure, and of course a site dedicated to the needs of those who wish to democratically hold the council to account. And be realistic about content – what, in the modern era, would be better maintained – still by council staff – on Wikipedia rather than the council website?

Trying to tie together 9000+ pages, all with radically different content aimed at radically different audiences, is where we’ve gone wrong. It’s time to be more radical in our approaches to content strategy. Actually having a content strategy would be a god start for many.