I was absolutely astounded to see the signpost on their REAL site is still there, I thought it was just on the screenshot on your blog.

It dawned on me actually, that this “Useful links” is actually all the external sites they feel obliged to link to – just bundled up together.

I am rethinking my description of the links anti-pattern as a result.

You see, I suddenly got a flashback.

I have a feeling that Useful links list is an indicator of a botched attempt to respond to a number of internal pressures.

“The committee voted that the link for this should be shown on the home page of the website” – is one of the most frequent.

Very often I found out this was actually not the case, but the deliverer of the message tried to force my arm up my back in order to get a link to some obscure, but precious project.

Now what is a webadminer to do? Stick them all in Useful links is one way out – its a bit like the link to TransportDirect.info, a fantastic and most laudable site – but instead of finding out how TDi works and how you can use it to allow ppl to find travel plans to the council offices, they just stick a link in Useful links. Box ticked, job done, back to minesweeper.

The link to direct.gov.uk – now that is mandatory (!)

What’s a webadminer to do? Do what you are told, or put your foot down and start upsetting people. You cant link to EVERYTHING from the home page, so who gets their own way? The most powerful.

“the chief exec wants this on the home page now – and she says don’t change the text at all”

And to which usability class the chief exec go to?

Which delegation classes did the chief exec go to? perhaps more to the point. Chain of command anybody?

None of the above is fictional, it happened to me – a lot, but I developed strategies to get out of it.

So you see how I take bad home page design to be a barometer of poor management style, this isn’t just an organisation with a usability problem – but it could well be an organisation at war with itself.

Frankenstein site, yeah what a jolt that is, but its not their site, if you look at the URL.

http://sutton.moderngov.co.uk/mgMemberIndex.asp?bcr=1

Good job I didn’t use their css text-resizer to change the size of the text, all that would have changed too when I made the ‘seamless’ journey between the two.

Interestingly this part of their site (?) features parts of the LGNL (Local Gov Navigation List) which seems to have now been abandoned in their “new improved” site.

A truly questionable decision, probably made by a committee, a committee ignorant of the facts.

Its like the fuzzy “Do it online”, wtf? That’s another pet hate.

What, do it? What like a rabbit?

Do it, go on do it, its like a dare.

Do friggin what? I’m already online! Really, its just a crock.

When you click that link, you just end up on another intermediate page with 2 options, then say you pick “pay it” you go to another holding page before passing another Frankenstiein Jolt into:

https://www.e-paycapita.com/sutton/index.jsp

Cripes ! Whats happened to my text size?

I just had that the right size, now its reduced to 8pt again.

Hang on, where’s the lovely A-Z gone, where’s the search box? What, is plain html too hard to add to a template all of a sudden?

I have to stop and get some work done. Thanks for replying with all those points.

You’ve given me loads more ideas. IA Leftovers, hmm, gonna have a think about that one, see if I spot it elsewhere …

Paul

But once the space is freed up it could be used for actual content (radical, I know). How about listing the current consultations rather than just providing a link to them? Of course, this would help if each consultation actually had its own page or at least an in-page target, which they don’t at the moment.

Something tells me that this CMS isn’t able to create categories of pages and then automatically generate lists of the pages in those categories. If it can, the consultations page is an obvious place to do it:

http://www.sutton.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=2643

A couple more anti-patterns for your site:

1. Clock/Calendar

Generating the current date/time and displaying it on a page for no reason than to fill space and make the site look current. I’ve written about this today here:

http://adrianshort.co.uk/2008/09/29/94/

2. Information Architecture Leftovers

Inspired by the usefully-titled “Information” section in Sutton’s left-hand nav, IA Leftovers are what you get when you do a weak IA job and end up with stuff that can’t be meaningfully categorised in your hierarchy. So you create categories with vague and meaningless titles to hold the arbitrary and unrelated (according to your analysis) leftovers.

Or is this section called Information to distinguish it from all the non-information elsewhere?

You can see a great example of Frankensite if you go here:

http://www.sutton.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=481

and click through to “Councillors Information” (sic)

This shows the old site template running on Moderngov, complete with the old navbar replete with broken links to the old URL schema.

Link Ghetto. ROFL That is sweet.

Oh, yummy, how about “Crap art”?

Yeah, my eye was drawn to that awful visual hack, but mostly because I am totally in awe of the “Useful links” label, and the mentality behind it.

I especially roared at the way the sign pointed into the centre of the home page, bliss.

But why “Useful”?

Listen, we have got a load of links and we thought we would sort them out, useful ones and crap ones.

It always begs the question, where is its sister sign, “Useless links”? It could balance the page up so nicely couldn’t it?

Now of course that would be silly, so why don’t they just call it “Links” – sounds too much like golf?

This all reminds me very much of the first days of the telephone, when it was rare that anyone had a phone. In the village I live in, next to my inlaws in fact, my inlaws are very proud of the fact that their home was #1. And in the local mayors office there is a “phone directory” from the 20s or 30s with all the phone numbers in it. There are less than 10.

No town keeps its own record of phone numbers any more, there is a discovery system which is well documented and supported called the phone directory.

Now I remember in 98, when I started in local gov, that we had a page called useful local links – and it had hardly anything on it, just a link to the local am-dram society and the few local councils around us that actually had a website. Now these were useful local links because they were the ONLY local links.

That was the equivalent of the phone directory in the 20s.

Useful links now is an anti-pattern caused by ineptitude.

My definition of Useful links is “External links on a page which can reasonably be judged to be in context with with helping a visitor to complete his internet journey in order to fulfil some likely task. That task can be divined from the title and meta data contained in that webpage.”

In this case those links should not yet another click away but should appear on the page, managed centrally and clearly marked, and ideally carry some meta data describing what is important about that link.

This rarely happens because of many forces – some of which I have documented.

For a variety of reasons, maybe because they are technically inept, they (Sutton) cannot do what they should do, therefore they do what they think is the closest match (“Useful links”), and after all that’s what they do down the road at “Council Y” – et voila, another anti-pattern has been teased out from the digital duvet-cover which is council sites in the UK.

I only published that anti patterns stuff to get it off my chest, and I had thought of eventually making blog entries out of them.

You’ve given me new momentum.

ps Did you ever read Catch 22?

You’re right, doing a comparison between different council sites does reveal many patterns and anti-patterns. I’d prefer to call this plain-old Linkrot as it’s not the user’s direct concern whether someone’s site gets a good SE profile, though it helps. Their main consideration is when they click on a link it should work.

I have considered setting up a redirect system similar to the one you describe. Sutton used to have a whole set of named redirects like http://www.sutton.gov.uk/haveyoursay which were used extensively in print and elsewhere. All those are now broken.

I’m just starting to get Google Alerts for pages on the council site that I’ve already read and know about, because Google is starting to index the site again and thinks all those pages with new URLs are new pages. *sigh*

I assume this has completely broken any continuity in the council’s web stats, too.

There’s a wonderful irony in the “Useless links” anti-pattern as demonstrated here. As a campaigner for better urban design I’m keen to see pointless clutter and signage removed from streets. Here the Useful Links section is illustrated by a gratuitous slice of badly-Photoshopped clip art of exactly the kind of sign that would probably be clutter in the street. On the web, both the image and the link section itself are clutter. The links wouldn’t be any less useful if they were randomly generated from a large set. If they’re not contextual they’re clutter.

More broadly, I call a Links section or page within a site a Link Ghetto. I know from the stats of various sites I’ve managed that no-one ever uses them. Some organisations like to maintain them through inertia or due to the misplaced notion that there is some value (either “real world” or in an SEO sense) in this kind of reciprocal linking. There isn’t and those things should just go.

Always consider the maxim, “Every time you add something you take something away”. If you can do without something, you should. Crap Clip Art (or even just Clip Art, it’s the same) is another anti-pattern exemplified in spades by the new Sutton Council site.

Nicely written.

You have identified and described rather nicely one of the outcomes of one of the major local gov “anti-patterns” – SEO Suicide ( http://www.councilsites.co.uk/about/antipatterns.htm )

I had the dubious fortune to work for a District council whose upstream County council did this trick very frequently, sometimes a couple of times A YEAR.

Someone fiddled with the setting of their cms/Lotus Notes and broke every inbound link AGAIN.

This went on for years. Eventually I learned never to link directly to another website, but to leave the link in a database, so I could regularly check it, and to reference the link from pages – so in pages I had “link1234″, which then looked up the real URL and sent users on.

It was a blessing in disguise actually, because it meant I could record how many ppl clicked which links and when – and feed this back into navigation.

I am a techy, and I know Sutton can fix all those broken links by redirecting users, or use their webserver’s software to redirect users. They just cant be bothered, why should they, what are you going to do?

Go to another council?

I will link to this posting from my site, you really hit the usability nail on the head.

You may also be interested in reading about CoolURI s from the W3C

http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/

p.s. Oh, quickly, quickly … I just spotted a new anti-pattern “Useful links” … I will write that one up, its a real howler.