My girlfriend recently told me that her home city, Kreuzlingen has a new homepage, since a few weeks, to be more exactly since the 5th of Decembre(see the press release), and that she does not like it. She requested me to have a look on the page and maybe write my opinion into my blog. And here I am, writing about the new homepage of Kreuzlingen.
To be honest, at the first look this homepage looks nice. By the way it has been implemented by a local web and advertising agency. So what images and layout is concerned, are they pretty good, I like the layout. Nice colors, fonts are easy to read and clearly structured welcome page, with a big search engine entry field on the lower left side.
When we look at the second page (to reach when clicked on the "Weiter" hotspot-area in the top-image of the startpage) we see again a clearly structured site, with a big tag cloud. Again a nice feature originating from the Web 2.0 trend. And again the big search engine field at the top.
So there is nothing bad with the layout, but with the technique behind this homepage. The search engine is nice, but too dominant. That is what my girlfriend has told me too. You only reach content of this homepage via the tag cloud or the search engine. The navigation on the left is degenerated to a pure topic structuring mechanism for the search engine and has not much to do with the contents represented or found there, since all pages are indexed and searched by relevance of the keyword and not of the corresponding topic. The official reason for this dominant search engine was, that the most visitors have anyway used the internal search function to look for a specific keyword and they do not mind in which category this belongs (Source: Press release).
The reasoning behind this may wrong, that if the most visitors search the site anyway, we can implement a strong search engine. Another assumption and I personally think this might be a more appropriate explanation for the phenomenon of the massive searches, is that the homepage was too complex or the content too nested, that the visitors did not find their way through the navigation and therefore used the search engine. So maybe another approach in redesigning this homepage might have been to look at the target sites of the searches and position them more public in the navigation or on the pages.
But nevertheless, the search engine is well implemented (at a technical level) since it uses a mix between tags and the full text index of the content. Another thing that I found impressing, was the content itself. Clearly designed as everything and with some tiny nice features on the right side as well (as you can see on the third screenshot above). On one hand you have the hint for the linked categories (labeled with "Vernetzte Rubriken"), which is sometimes a little bit bad, since the color differences between the categories are not that big and it is therefore difficult to identify for which category the color-button now exactly stands for.
Second you have a part of linked contents (labeled with "Vernetzte Informationen"), where you can go directly to other articles or contents related to the actual page.
And last you have a direct feedback function (labeled with "Ihre Bewertung") integrated in every content page, where you can give feedback about the value of the information presented with yes or no and if you wish with additional comments.
Overall I have to say, are there some good concepts for usability in this homepage, but there is also some need for fine tuning the implementation - especially the search engine and its dominant dictate on the visitors' navigation.
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