Steven J Hagen

http://spiritofcitywebs.com/node/51

Sitka, Alaska
http://www.cityofsitka.com/

This is a small city and like a lot of the small cities it does not fit in to "city template" that I have found. This is not a good or a bad thing it just make it harder to do a comparison criticism of the site. I also understand that content production in a small city is much harder to get when a city has a small staff. I love the homey feel of the site it is not overly professional and feels like I can get a great understanding of the happening of the city from watching the news feed. (is there an RSS for that?) Love the pictures I know that it is beautiful up there would love to see more of that and I like the credits on the pictures. Here is were I could see a good place for growth in design. Things that I would suggest for a site like this is a clear separation between the site wide navigation and the divisional and topical menus. This allow for a greater ability to expand the site as it is need. The second thing that I would recommend is a search engine. Google custom search is great for a site like this. it is simple to set up, free to the government, more powerful then a keyword search and gives results in methods that is easy to understand by most people. (http://www.google.com/coop/cse/) I would also start working on some of the standard pages that most city websites have about there website it self, disclaimers, privacy, information collection and accessibility would be a good starting list.