Manchester City Council
I applaud the change and thinking outside of the box, but the Manchester City Council website looks like a $45 Wordpress theme off of Themeforest. The slider appears to offer no value to the site other than taking up a massive amount of room without really justifying its existence. I'm not a designer, I'm a developer and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind that slider.While I agree that the trendy look of the site is better than most Government sites, it tries too hard to the point the change and potential this site could have had is gone. The reason Government websites are usually ugly is not because Government's are afraid of change or can't justify the cash it's because there are content accessibility guidelines to adhere too. And when you've got to make your content accessible to people with disabilities well your options can be somewhat limited (especially colour use).This is the perfect example of everything wrong with modern web design. Instead of thinking, "What can we NOT add to this site design" designers seem to be thinking, "How many full screen images, rounded corners, parallax effects, CSS animations, Javascript effects and large amounts of custom fonts can we cram into this site?"I can foresee a lot of issues for people with eyesight problems on this site, aren't Governments supposed to adhere to WCAG rules and a lot more stricter than non-Government websites do? The images don't even have alt tags on them, Web Developer common sense rule #1 — Always put alt tags on images, especially when they're being used as icons in content sections, wow.