City of Boston Gets a Redesign

The City of Boston launched their new website design this weekend. First off the pea green and purple is gone. With questionable relevance to Boston the unflattering color scheme will not be missed. Visitors to the new site are welcomed with iconic images of Boston on the top banner on each of the sub-sections of the site. It is a little sad that the City's Bostonia seal (pictured left) has lost prominence on the page, but overall the design looks to give more functionality to the user. The navigation bar allows users to jump to any of the seven main subsections of the site. The main areas include five constituent groups, online services, and a jump back to the home page. Each main area features a different iconic photo as a header image only on the front page for that 'tab', subsequent pages default to a smaller blue strip at the top. Below the navigation, which runs throughout the site, the redesign incorporates the internets' popular three-column format.

Column 1 serves as local navigation for the subsection you're browsing – it has a tendency to jump around a bit in the scope and breadth of the menus, but overall gives a fair assessment of useable options in each section. Column 2, as it should, contains the main content of the page – a little narrower than one might hope for with all the information and links they're cramming into some pages. Column 3 offers a search box on every page, often a link to the city calendar (which has not been redesigned), news/press releases/announcements where applicable, and a related links section – it's hard to tell how those links are generated. We were hoping with the changes that Menino would get a blog – something keeping track of his weekly column and podcast. The option is probably there, but the archives haven't been built yet. One thing has seemingly changed about the weekly column - Tommy M. seems to be much happier in his headshot picture.

Overall the aesthetic overhaul of the City of Boston website is a welcome change. Abandoning the nearly text-only on bad colors site was a good decision. The functionality of the site doesn't seem to have changed all that much. New menus and graphics only change so much, it's been enough to get us to browse around the site more than we have in a while and uncover some new mailing lists to join. A welcome change thus far, a fairly well-commented template (look at the source code), provides a base to which improvements and tweaks can be made. And just because we can't resist we'll throw the question out there if c1tyw0rker played a hand in the transformation or if Boston is just now feeling their Oates?