<story><title>Manchester City Council</title><url>http://www.manchester.gov.uk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DigitalSea</author><text>I applaud the change and thinking outside of the box, but the Manchester City Council website looks like a $45 Wordpress theme off of Themeforest. The slider appears to offer no value to the site other than taking up a massive amount of room without really justifying its existence. I&apos;m not a designer, I&apos;m a developer and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind that slider.&lt;p&gt;While I agree that the trendy look of the site is better than most Government sites, it tries too hard to the point the change and potential this site could have had is gone. The reason Government websites are usually ugly is not because Government&apos;s are afraid of change or can&apos;t justify the cash it&apos;s because there are content accessibility guidelines to adhere too. And when you&apos;ve got to make your content accessible to people with disabilities well your options can be somewhat limited (especially colour use).&lt;p&gt;This is the perfect example of everything wrong with modern web design. Instead of thinking, &quot;What can we NOT add to this site design&quot; designers seem to be thinking, &quot;How many full screen images, rounded corners, parallax effects, CSS animations, Javascript effects and large amounts of custom fonts can we cram into this site?&quot;&lt;p&gt;I can foresee a lot of issues for people with eyesight problems on this site, aren&apos;t Governments supposed to adhere to WCAG rules and a lot more stricter than non-Government websites do? The images don&apos;t even have alt tags on them, Web Developer common sense rule #1 — Always put alt tags on images, especially when they&apos;re being used as icons in content sections, wow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hglaser</author><text>What a predictable top comment for a Hacker News thread. :(&lt;p&gt;A government website showcases a design that is &lt;i&gt;leaps and bounds&lt;/i&gt; ahead of &lt;i&gt;any other government site we can think of&lt;/i&gt;, and HN&apos;s top comment casually dismisses it.&lt;p&gt;To rewrite something you said: &quot;This is the perfect example of everything wrong with [HN comments].&quot;&lt;p&gt;I, for one, am floored that someone in city government was able to rise above the bureaucracy and ship something truly useful and delightful for citizens. I would love nothing more than to meet the people involved and buy them a pint. Well done, guys.</text></comment>
<story><title>Manchester City Council</title><url>http://www.manchester.gov.uk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DigitalSea</author><text>I applaud the change and thinking outside of the box, but the Manchester City Council website looks like a $45 Wordpress theme off of Themeforest. The slider appears to offer no value to the site other than taking up a massive amount of room without really justifying its existence. I&apos;m not a designer, I&apos;m a developer and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind that slider.&lt;p&gt;While I agree that the trendy look of the site is better than most Government sites, it tries too hard to the point the change and potential this site could have had is gone. The reason Government websites are usually ugly is not because Government&apos;s are afraid of change or can&apos;t justify the cash it&apos;s because there are content accessibility guidelines to adhere too. And when you&apos;ve got to make your content accessible to people with disabilities well your options can be somewhat limited (especially colour use).&lt;p&gt;This is the perfect example of everything wrong with modern web design. Instead of thinking, &quot;What can we NOT add to this site design&quot; designers seem to be thinking, &quot;How many full screen images, rounded corners, parallax effects, CSS animations, Javascript effects and large amounts of custom fonts can we cram into this site?&quot;&lt;p&gt;I can foresee a lot of issues for people with eyesight problems on this site, aren&apos;t Governments supposed to adhere to WCAG rules and a lot more stricter than non-Government websites do? The images don&apos;t even have alt tags on them, Web Developer common sense rule #1 — Always put alt tags on images, especially when they&apos;re being used as icons in content sections, wow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>talkingquickly</author><text>I&apos;d agree with you on the slider not being a good use of space. But I&apos;d argue that it does get some other things right which a lot of uk government sites fail on.&lt;p&gt;In particular the simple presentation of the primary services people access with the option to expand out for other less frequently used ones. This is a huge improvement on, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/home.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/home.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have to use that site quite regularly and pretty much the only way to get anything is googling site:www.lambeth.gov.uk with the service you&apos;re looking for.&lt;p&gt;Agree accessibility could be an issue although looking at the fairly prominent accessibility section at the top of the site, it does look like they&apos;ve at least considered it. I don&apos;t know enough about accessibility to evaluate whether what they&apos;ve done is sufficient.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps holding this up as how they &quot;should&quot; be designed is a step too far but to me it looks like a step in the right direction.</text></comment>