City Service – what should the city’s web portal be like?

Appearance of public pages

Today’s post on our blog is about public pages. City portals – both large and small – play an important role on the Internet. Some are rich in content and graphics, while others are sparse and older. Many cities, or rather their governing authorities, are increasingly thinking about their city’s website and focusing more attention on it. They want it to be the city’s pride, not its bane – as it is in many cases. Nevertheless, the city web service has to contain useful websites – useful for a citizen or a tourist, or an entrepreneur (local companies catalogue).

The WCAG 2.0 standards, which are so important, also come into play – concerning people with disabilities. The city service and other public benefit pages must be accessible to people with disabilities. The WCAG standard must be at least level AA. In addition, the deadline for implementing these standards was May 30, 2015. As a result, many public institutions have been doing the website upgrade procedure at an express pace.

The Polish Academy of Accessibility meets this challenge and has made ready-to-use tools available on its website. They are intended to help apply WCAG 2.0(Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0) to websites. However, sometimes it turns out that in order to implement them properly, you need to use the help of companies such as our interactive agency. With our help city portal, as well as any website, will become available for everyone. The graphic on the left shows one of our solutions.

At the end of May 2015, only 1.7% of websites met the accessibility standard for people with disabilities.

In addition to being accessible to people with disabilities, the official city website should also contain information about the working hours of individual offices and departments. For the resident, useful websites include municipal waste management or news about their town and also easy navigation. For a tourist, on the other hand, information on public transport or local cultural facilities such as monuments, theatres, cinemas or shopping malls will be important.

Special attention should be paid to the issue which is the structure of the website. Even the coolest websites have well-organized Menus and are easy to find your way around. Unfortunately, it often feels like one in three city services doesn’t have this.

Also an important point. Good websites are responsive websites. What does that mean? In a nutshell, it means that you can browse the online city service on your smartphone without getting tired. The page itself will adapt to the device on which it is displayed.

Finally, we would like to present websites where we have implemented the previously mentioned WCAG 2.0 standard, which allows people with disabilities to fully use the website.