How good are municipal portals at search?
Municipal websites are collections of diverse content, starting from announcements and ending with information about local events. Two thirds of German towns contain more than 500 pages, suggesting that a working onsite search can help citizens find the right content without getting lost in convoluted menus.
In June 2020, we checked one thousand randomly-selected towns and analyzed if their onsite search is up to the challenge.
The results
98% of towns miss at least one modern search best practice:
Some towns have more than one problem, so the numbers cannot be added.
What do these numbers mean?
The above numbers mean that if towns were to provide all 575 online services selected by German federal government for implementation, citizens would have a major issue with finding them because the search systems don’t work very often.
In addition, this means that the time and opportunities lost by citizens who are not able to quickly find the relevant content are not seriously considered.
Why does this problem exist?
Many municipal websites were created decades ago with just a few pages. Over the years they kept adding content, and the moment when the traditional website menus stopped working was likely overlooked.
In addition, a robust onsite-search system requires a different technology stack and skill set from the town’s IT department. So, it’s no surprise that most towns are not able to solve this alone.
Why traditional methods fail?
When a town decides to improve its website, it often goes one of the two routes:
- It relies on the in-house IT team.
- It hires a local web-agency.
Both approaches have their issues, frequently resulting in projects lasting 12-18 months and costing tens of thousands euros while still not solving the problem fully.
Towns that go the in-house route often realize that:
- They have limited access to IT talent experienced in configuring and maintaining search systems.
- There are no integrated solutions designed specifically for towns.
- There are many other tasks on the plate of the IT department, so search projects are often put on hold.
Towns that decide to hire a web-agency often see that:
- They need to go through the purchasing process, so the price becomes the focal point.
- Lost opportunities created for citizens from an underperforming system are often overlooked since it’s hard to put a EUR number on them.
What can be a 10x better solution?
A 10x-better solution needs to satisfy the following criteria:
- Be an integrated solution focused on the needs of small towns.
- Be an open-source solution to ensure the maximum synergies from learnings and contributions made by each town.
- Be managed by a team experienced in search systems and information discovery.
This is exactly what we’ve created. Moreover, our solution can offer not just one but two 10x improvements:
- Time to launch: weeks instead of 12+ months.
- Setup costs: from free to thousands of euros instead of tens thousands.
An open source town portal
You can find more details on the GitLab page of our project:
Here are the key features of our software:
- A modern information discovery system, including fully-featured-search and modern-navigation systems.
- An optimized presentation of popular content categories.
- A fully-responsive user interface supporting all modern device types: smartphones, tablets, and computers.
- A user interface honoring the latest Web Accessibility standards.
- A solution built for an easy cloud deployment.
Take a look at our 1-minute overview video:
Can your town benefit?
Definitely! We’re expanding our early-access program to include more towns. So, if you know someone in the office of the mayor, please share this message and help the changes happen sooner rather than later!