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Designing Primary Navigation For a City Website

Municipalities have a common mission but there is little standard about how they divide up duties that support the citizens. The customer base of there website is often a navigation nightmare due to the widely different classes of customers that they serve. A quick look at the customer base can show how different they are. I have divided the classes of customer as I have seen them to better understand the design problem.

  1. Tourist – people that want to come to the city for several different reasons. Tourist since they are causal visitor with several options they need to be sold or persuaded to want to come.
  2. Citizens – people that live in or close to the City of Richmond which are also divided into subclass of
    1. Newcomers – people that are new to a city have one time needs that they often look to the city’s website to find the answers to.
    2. Residents – people that return to a city's website for information that relates to how they interact with the city. Their interaction are diverse range of questions that they will need answers to.
    3. Senior Residents -- that have special accessibility concerns.
    4. Youths -- that use a subset of city service but may or may not have the navigation skills that that a Resident would.
  3. Business –
    1. People wanting to do business with the City of Richmond.
    2. People wanting to start a business within the Municipality.
    3. People currently doing business in the City of Richmond.
    4. The City of Richmond desire to attract new business.

      4. There is developing a common vocabulary with Municipalities when they deal with primary navigation. As I look at a cities website to see how they looked at the problem I have been noting the vocabulary that they are using. I have looked at 1 site for this survey.

      "Home" has occured 1 time
      "News" has occured 1 time
      "Government" has occured 1 time
      "e-Services" has occured 1 time
      "Residents" has occured 1 time
      "Business" has occured 1 time
      "Vistors" has occured 1 time
      "Press" has occured 1 time
      "Site Map" has occured 1 time
      "Contact Us" has occured 1 time

      With Menu Navigation the number of items in a menu and the number of tiers I also believe are important

      Number of items in a single menu tier
      11 items has occured 1 time
      Number of tiers in Primary Navigation

      Site referenced in my survey
      Aurora Colorado