Anyone can design a website, just like anyone can take a photograph. But good web design, like good photography, is really, really hard to do.
And the evidence is all around us. Most websites aren’t that great, even those from well-resourced organisations that can hire teams of people to work on them.
Council websites are just about the hardest kind of website to design. Councils are large organisations that deliver an extremely diverse range of services within a sensitive public/political context. And they have to serve the whole community, not just most of it. And so while it’s undeniably true that many if not most council sites have a long way to go before they realise their full potential, I have every sympathy for those who are trying to deliver such complex designs with often very limited resources.
Good design means getting the big ideas right and then sweating the details. These are both really tough jobs and you don’t have forever to do them.
You don’t need to be an extreme minimalist to understand that every time you add something to a website you take something away. You increase users’ cognitive load. You draw their eye. You displace other page elements, or if you’re adding pages, you add another item to your navigation and search results. It all adds up.
I’ve never seen a website that was improved by adverts.
Every great website has come about because people worked hard and smart at stopping it being crap. They had the balls to say “no” more often than they said “yes”. They trimmed out flabby content, sharpened up the writing, weren’t satisfied with second-rate images. Engineers worked to progressively trim fractions of a second from the page load times, tweaking the front-end code, the back-end application and the server infrastructure. Titles and headlines were rewritten. Everything was meticulously researched and tested.
It’s hard to see how slapping a couple of ad blocks on the page is going to make this job any easier. And it’s not like the average council website is so fast, clear and simple that it can afford to take any kind of usability hit.
Ah, but they do it in the private sector. Indeed they do.
And their websites are undeniably worse for it. Of course they’d rather not do it, but if selling ad space on your site is necessary to bring in essential revenue to run it, you don’t have a choice.
The best private sector sites running adverts are very different from council websites. Take The Guardian. Although this is a big and complex site, essentially all most visitors are doing is finding and reading news. That’s just a single task. Council sites have to support hundreds of tasks. And The Guardian has design and development resources several orders of magnitude greater than any council. All their content is produced by professional writers and photographers, too.
So councils have the challenge of producing some of the most complex websites imaginable. But they also have the advantage that they’re funded to do that. They don’t need to raise revenue through the site itself. They can concentrate their resources on producing the absolutely best user experience possible without having to shill for a few pennies on the side.
Councils should fight for every inch of quality on their websites. Adverts are a completely unnecessary and harmful distraction from the real task at hand. Make your site great and the benefits will far exceed any cash you can drum up by encouraging people to click away from it.
