Bad website...well, sort of

How ironic. My family moved to Clinton Township last summer and this is my first time visiting the city's website because of a class assignment. If I were a newcomer to the website with no knowledge of web design, I would think the page was fine.

However, that's not the case now.

There are some positives about it. The site is well organized, no crazy color scheme (the blue, white and gray fits the mood of the site), no ridiculous icons and navigation is there for everyone to see.

Now on to the negatives.

The first thing I noticed was the homepage failed to provide a blurb, telling you what website's purpose. I guess they assumed the banner info was enough. You figure it out. Another noticeable thing was the primary navigation bar. It irked me because when I went over any of the links, a list of other links would appear. There's just too much information for that and it makes everything looks cluttered.

For example, when you drag the mouse over the "Welcome" bar, only one link appears. It's just not necessary. A small, yet significant observation were the divs, particularly on the right side were longer than others. In regards to the navigation again, it can become confusing because if you click on a link, you have no way of getting back to the homepage and the primary navigation completely changes. The website also has important information below the scroll and when I dragged my mouse over the links or tried to click on them, the color remained the same. One of my pet peeves are advertisements randomly on the side of websites and this one succeeded in doing this. There are ads on both sides of the site.

Overall, the website is not a horrific one. Yet, there is too much going on in terms of information all over the place and appearing to cluttered. It could use some multimedia elements to make the site more lively (maybe interviews with residents for example). They're off to a good start, but there's always room for improvement.