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Kudos to anonymous city web-site designer(s)

September 22nd, 2009 · 6 Comments

Okay, me and about five people in the world care about this, but that’s what blogs are for, right? Anyway, I just have to comment on the interesting little changes that have been happening on the city’s website.

First, someone started changing the picture according to the weather so if it was snowy, there’d be a picture of the city with freshly snowed-on mountains in the distance. When it was warm and sunny, the picture changed again. I just checked in now and the picture is a video, zooming away from close-up shots of the city. (It actually made me a little motion sick, even while I was admiring it.)

That’s along with all kinds of other little rearrangements and lots more information on all kinds of city initiatives littered throughout the site, which make many reports easy to find. (If you want to read the final report on the city’s consultation with residents on the Granville Street HEAT shelters, which came out after they closed, they’re right here by the way.) A policy wonk could just spend days trolling through all the pretty new pages and end up forgetting completely to twitter for hours on end.

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  • Frothingham

    i just checked and it shows the motion picture of Vancouver on sunny days, this guy has the real deal on changing with the weather and time of day: http://www.1976design.com/blog/

  • rebecca

    Tania has done a great job with the site!

  • Todd Sieling

    I agree, the site has been getting incrementally better over time, meaning the team is making changes small enough to get under the radar of those who would otherwise mess it up 🙂

  • peter G

    Yes.. it’s very pretty, but a web site should enhance the public’s ability to communicate with the city. Have you tried to email the Mayor? He’s much too busy to respond to a mere taxpayer. Try contacting his assistant… Surprise! she’s much to busy too…

  • grounded

    Agreed, the new pages are good and much more accessible. Let’s hope the Planning Department (http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/) and Community webpages (http://vancouver.ca/community_profiles/index.htm) are next. They have way too much small fonted text and not enough use of images and colour.

  • bob

    If you look at some of the pages in the planning website (for example) you can see that some of them have been redone with the new standard template: http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/rezoning/

    I think they’re incrementally changing everything over to that.