Does Your Website Suck?
It should be driving organizational goals and delighting users. If it's not, you've come to the right place to learn why.
Welcome to the Good Government Files weekly Friday deep dive! We’re back today with the third installment in our Branding Series. (Here’s the first and second.) We’ll return to our Servant Leaders series in a few weeks. And a reminder that to read all of Friday’s posts you need to be a paid subscriber. You can update your subscription with this helpful button if need be.
Now, about that clickbait headline …
If you have anything to do with a government website, you’ll be glad you took the bait. You’ll be hearing insights from two experts in dealing with the challenges and opportunities unique to creating and managing kick-ass public sector websites. As I was interviewing Mike Steckel and Polly Thurston from Mighty Citizen last week, it was clear they understood exactly what it takes to craft websites that are equal parts beautiful and functional.
If your website isn’t visually compelling and/or suffers glitchy usability, that’s a massive problem for your brand. Your website is your organization’s window to the world, literally accessible to anyone on the planet with an internet connection. How it looks and functions speaks volumes about how your agency views its customers and how you want to be seen in the world.
Pretty and functional are just the start, though. As Mighty Citizen states on its (kick-ass) website, “Ideas are cool, but experiences are cooler. Web development is how designs come to life in interactive, engaging ways. Web development transforms ideas into experiences.”
Indeed. And here’s a fantastic, profound, and true quote from Polly, the Creative Director for the firm, also from MC’s website.
Great design is the complex pursuit of simplicity.
Here’s one more insight from the MC website (I told you it was good!) on Visual Design: “At its best, visual design works in harmony with your content to create an unmistakable, unforgettable experience for your users. It’s not about picking pretty colors; it’s about injecting your design with thoughtful concepts.”
Does your website create an unmistakable, unforgettable experience for your users? Or does it suck? It’s probably somewhere in between. If it’s closer to the latter, it may be because you haven’t given enough thought about its connection to your brand. If this is your first look at the Branding Series, here’s our working definition of the subject: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not around. Branding is what you do about it.”
First comes the research
“So often people come to us with like, ‘Well, we need to redo our website. Our website’s really outdated and it’s a mess.’ But what is often wrapped up in that is there is either no brand or the brand has been reinvented and the only brand they have is attached to maybe a strategic plan they put out a year or two ago,” Polly said. “But it’s not actually branding the agency.”
If you haven’t taken the time, effort, and expense of developing a branding program for your agency, then your website design will never be what it could and should be, says Mike, VP of UX and Research for Mighty Citizen.
“A lot of it really starts with just who do you want to be?” Mike says. “What is your vision for where you’re trying to get to as an organization? What outcomes do you want your organization to be driving as a whole? If you’re working from my perspective, what I often see is super busy people who are responding to the events of the day and who are building their assets around, like, compliance with the law, but that is low stakes. So, we try to get them to get a bigger vision for what they could become and write it down.”
Yes, faithful GGF readers, we see again the importance of the vision thing. Vision and strategic planning go hand in glove with effective branding. High-performing organizations take the time to do this kind of work. Which, let’s be honest, can be a real slog. And sometimes you’re going to have a city manager or city council that just doesn’t want to take the kind of time, effort and expense necessary to do it right1.
But if you hire smart, experienced professionals like Mike and Polly, they’ll ask you the kinds of questions that elicit the necessary responses for developing a top-notch website, regardless of whether you have a formal branding program in place.
“We want to have a discovery process that allows us to get to know (our clients), get to know their problems, get to know their vision for where they want to be,” Polly says. “And, if we can include any stakeholder interviews or focus groups, we love to do that. We talk a lot with our clients about the ‘curse of knowledge’ and that they know so much about what they do, but don’t understand what their audiences don’t know. But we, as newcomers to the subject matter, can see those gaps of, like, oh, you use all this jargon on your website, or your websites are organized according to how your business is organized, but not how a user would think of it. And so that discovery goes a long way to helping us.”
The Curse of Knowledge. Polly and MC should trademark that phrase because it can be an absolute killer to effective website development. If you’ve been through a web design process, you know that, internally, all the folks who don’t work in communications assume the website architecture should reflect the org chart. Guess what? Most folks don’t know trash and recycling services are part of public works. Heck, most folks would have difficulty defining “public works.” Isn’t everything governments do public and work?
“The question (during discovery), for us, is what is the job of your website?” Mike says. “It might be the job is primarily an economic development website because we’re a growing suburb or whatever, but it might be that we’re here for services. But what is the job that your website is doing? That is really, I think, the starting point.”
Polly quickly added: “Yeah, and it’s tricky for government because a lot of times their websites have to do a lot of different jobs.”
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