Best local community website?

October 17, 2006 12:03 AM

What is your favourite local website? What makes it so good?

I’m a web-design student and over the (Australian) university holidays, I want to keep my hand in (and get better) and I’ve decided to create a site for my small town local community. Any buffoon (and some have) can put together a page with links to the council and the newspapers. I want to make something bigger and better and prettier. I want something that every mum looking for her kid's school's phone number will look at, and that every kid planning their weekend will have bookmarked. (Yes, I think small - it also means a really diverse audience).

What are the content-absolute-must-haves for a website for a geographical community? Links very welcome. Pet peeves also welcome (no horizontal scrolling – duh etc).

Go wild – if I haven’t got the skills or resources to implement your idea, it’ll still make interesting reading.

So far, I’ve thought of this:
Links to (or summaries of) council, community help (eg, police, hospital, mental health), education (local schools, universities), public transport, local map(s), clubs, organisations, churches, etc, weather, news, movies, history, radio stations, library, sports clubs, arts groups etc.

And I read all these(that applied).

posted by b33j to computers & internet (21 comments total)

if you're going to have a section for visitors/tourists, then you should have a decent photo gallery. whenever i travel, i always visit some sites dedicated to the town and look for a gallery. it probably has little/no practical value, but i really appreciate a well-put-together gallery (and get really pissed off at galleries with only couple pics or "under construction" images). fwiw. good luck.
posted by eebs at 12:23 AM on October 17, 2006

Keep the design plain, and avoid any "cute" menu effects.
posted by b1tr0t at 12:27 AM on October 17, 2006

I was on this page a few hours ago looking for the name of the local newspaper and I found it. I was ecstatic. However, it's in the not-particularly-helpfully named 'important links'. I don't know what you'd want to rename it - 'Community Information' or 'Community Links' perhaps - but I thought it was a good indication of a pretty decent town website.

A lot of your categories should probably be lumped together - clubs/orgs/churches/etc should be in some group, radio/sports/arts might be another one ('Entertainment' or something), 'Getting Around' can serve all your transport needs, etc.

One section I am always looking for on town websites would be a section called 'municipal services.' Do you have mandatory recycling, for example, in your town? It took me far too long to find out where my transfer station was on my current town's website (the worst design I have ever seen, btw - the categories are good, I think, if you ever get to the main page.) This is, in part, because while it mentions when the transfer station is open, it never tells you where it is.

Let my town stand as an example for 'prettier is not better,' as well. Some of the internal pages are still the old, ugly, functional style. Make sure your pages render properly with the oldest, clunkiest computer and browser you can get your hands on. And pretend you're designing with both hip young adults with swanky new computers and grandparents, blind in one eye, using WebTVs, in mind.
posted by cobaltnine at 12:38 AM on October 17, 2006

oh this is great stuff, thanks. I can see I'm going to want to mark everyone best answer.
posted by b33j at 1:06 AM on October 17, 2006

Given your location you're probably familiar with it, but the Brisbane City Council portal is surprisingly good. Overly cluttered design, yes, but the actual selection and range of content is pretty much spot-on for a portal. Could do with more pictures, though, and not of the "Encyclopedia Generica" stock-photo-looking ones they currently use.

Biggest thing, regardless of everything else? The information and links have to be kept current. There's hundreds of town directory sites that are nothing more than desolate wastelands of outdated information and broken links. Somehow - either technically, or by getting the local community actively involved - you need to stop this from happening.
posted by Pinback at 1:32 AM on October 17, 2006

by getting the local community actively involved

In my opinion, that is the onlyway to create a good local website.
posted by robcorr at 1:58 AM on October 17, 2006

I have long been a fan of this site dedicated to Bourne. The design isn't wonderful, and it links to a relatively lame sponsored message board, but it has several vital ingredients:

* Chronically updated content, both current and historical
* A strong personality in charge of the site--Rex is clearly opinionated but he also clearly cares a great deal about his town
* Lots of wonderful photos

There is a lack of local guidebook-type content, but his very thorough links page takes you to most everything you'd want to find out about the locale. If only my local governments had a site halfway as interesting...and we're a tourist town, not a former-market-town-quickly-becoming-another-suburb like Bourne is.
posted by maxwelton at 2:38 AM on October 17, 2006

To help keep the site up to date, maybe you could build it using nvu (good, easy, integrated FTP, free, runs on anything) and train other people in the community how to use that to maintain pages with content they're interested in being responsible for.
posted by flabdablet at 4:32 AM on October 17, 2006

Do micro-histories of buildings, even apartments within buildings. Maybe a clickable map that would show you descriptions and photos of what used to be at a particular address. Encourage people to add what they know, maybe old photos, maybe just when they lived at certain addresses. It could be especially fun for people to list their own homes, even if they live in big apartment buildings. When was it built? What did it look like going up? What was there before it -- was it an open field or was there an older building whose history you can document? Who first lived there? Who was sleeping in my bedroom, eating in my kitchen, and crapping in my bathroom X years ago? After you get names, can you track them or their descendents? Get a local historian (or entire local historical society) involved to guide that section -- they would love to have a way to organize and show off their local history knowledge online. If you (or the historians) can find old local business and phone directories, you can find out who and what was where. The main thing is to make an interface and database that many people can use -- something kinda wiki? -- but that experts can control and preserve from vandalism?
posted by pracowity at 5:08 AM on October 17, 2006

Some of our local websites are often not up to date. They usually have a calendar from last month, or something silly like that. How hard is it to update and keep information current? That is the most annoying.

Live Webcams are very nice to have too.
posted by LoriFLA at 5:34 AM on October 17, 2006

I spend a lot of time volunteering with the non-profit Northfield.org. We do citizen journalism, have an events calendar, business directory, photo gallery, moderated government official mailing list, etc., etc.

We run Drupal, which is the bees knees.

My advice to you is to leverage as much outside tech as you can to stretch your limited time (and that of your volunteers). We host photos with Flickr, discussions with Google Groups, event calendars with Upcoming.org, and so on and so forth. iCal and RSS allow us to tie it all together into a nearly seamless package.

We're always looking to recruit volunteers, be it photographers or tech people or writers. We don't have any money, so we repay with publicity. It's worked out quite well.

We've eschewed advertising, save for a single banner at the top of a page. We think this makes it more valuable to local businesses and it's sold out for the year.

I could go on and on and on.
posted by unixrat at 5:39 AM on October 17, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

Restaurants - with ability for users to post reviews. If that's too much, at least link to sites which have reviews (e.g. citysearch). Also make sure to have contact info for restaurant / bars and hopefully a link to a map.
Calendar of events for the coming week (live music etc). Even better - link calendar events to other websites
Richmond.com tries to do this, and sometimes achieves it...
posted by Mave_80 at 5:51 AM on October 17, 2006

Ipswich local history, online anyway, looks a bit of a mess.
posted by pracowity at 6:11 AM on October 17, 2006

How about Barristanet.com, the unofficial community web site of Montclair, New Jersey?
posted by TheManticore at 7:33 AM on October 17, 2006

Well, forgive the self-link (I'm a contributor), but I really like ArborUpdate for my town. A revolving cast of posters who are usually smart and connected cover a lot of news and government issues.
What makes it worth going to is the community that's there. People from the planning commission read it; city council reads it; local business owners read it. There's never huge traffic, but if you're wondering about something, it's a fantastic opportunity to get your questions answered by the people who make the decisions.
My other facorite local website is annarborisoverrated.com, which covers a similar demographic, only snarkily.
I guess what ties these two together is that each of them have a fairly narrow and well-defined purpose. Doing one thing well is worth far, far more than doing a lot of things crappily.
posted by klangklangston at 7:42 AM on October 17, 2006

I agree with klangklangston; it's all about the community. My favorite local website is from my hometown, Albuquerque, NM. While I can't comment too much on site design as I read it via feeds, I love that the commentary comes from diverse viewpoints and captures the quirkiness and inside jokes that only fellow Albuquerqueans would get. They've also got pretty lively message boards and great information for would-be residents. www.dukecityfix.com
posted by carlitos at 8:01 AM on October 17, 2006

http://www.ipswich-city.com/index.php
has good content, but . . .
posted by uspommie at 10:49 AM on October 17, 2006

gapersblock.com
posted by kooop at 11:17 AM on October 17, 2006

Thanks very much everyone, I really appreciate your input.
posted by b33j at 2:36 PM on October 17, 2006

The thing I'm always looking up is events. I know what the city is like, I see it every day. But there is so much going on and it changes and I want to know about it all so I can participate. Having a regularly updated events section gives the site ongoing utility, both to locals and tourists.

Here's our council website. In particular I spend time in the AK@play section looking up what is going on. The main site has links to the zoo and the library and other stuff where things are happening. I used this site when my neighbours were havinga party and I wanted to call noise control and again when my family was visiting and I wanted a list of art galleries and museums to send them to.

I also peruse the bFM gig guide, the C4 TV (music television station) gig guide, and the NZ Herald's Time Out entertainment section (available as print version only) looking for my favourite bands playing. It would be cool to have all this in one place, particularly given a lot of smaller gigs don't get listed.

Other places I go when bored, View Auckland and Tuorism Auckland. Again I'm looking for events and things to do, or sometimes new places in the city I can go.
posted by shelleycat at 10:26 PM on October 17, 2006

ipswich-city.com has good content, but . . . .
posted by uspommie at 9:49 PM on October 18, 2006