Houston-area cities and counties want you to go to their websites. How useful are they?

Among the most visited webpages for the city of Houston and Harris County is the home page. Houston’s home page was viewed 1.6 million in fiscal year 2024; 2 million people accessed the county’s home page.

Making those pages easy to navigate is important, researchers say.

“You can't prioritize everything. If you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing,” said Rebecca Woodbury, a local government website content designer.  “Editing your home page and making those tough decisions and saying ‘no’ to some department who wants their thing on the homepage,” 

So what are the first things that residents see when they visit a local government home page? 

Houston’s includes an efficiency study, a proposed short-term rental ordinance, a jobs page, a pet adoption section, links to trash and recycling schedules, property tax information and a portal for paying municipal court tickets. There also is a slideshow that includes links to revised rules for lead and copper water pipes, invitations to join the Fire Department or to have a wedding ceremony at municipal courts, and a picture of Mayor John Whitmire. The top of the page includes links to city departments and elected officials; further down are an event calendar news releases.

Harris County and Sugar Land both lead with 311 information on their home pages. The city of Katy, meanwhile, shows a calendar, travel page, jobs, maps, and payments and elections button, followed by a news section.

Jacinto City’s home page includes links to the Texas Sex Offender Registry, and pages to pay water or municipal court payments. There’s also a box to sign up for email notifications from the city. 

On a mobile phone, however, part of the Jacinto City logo at the top of the page is obscured and some lines of text overlap as you scroll down.

Researchers and experts say cities should design their sites for use on mobile phones, given their widespread use. In fiscal 2024, for example, 59 percent of traffic to Harris County’s home page came from mobile phone users, according to county data.

In addition to providing information and links to services, websites can help build trust between the public and local government. One way to do that, according to Dr. Marvuto Kalulu, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, is financial transparency.

“If the people don't know what's happening with the finances, it creates mistrust between the residents and the elected officials,” said Kalulu, who authors the state’s web transparency index report, which ranks each locality based on how much information is on its website.

On Pasadena’s website you can find annual city budgets going back to 2010. Humble includes its most recently adopted budget on its home page while the City of Houston and Harris County post budget documents, raw spreadsheet data and translated versions in Chinese, Spanish and Vietnamese.

How about information about elected officials? The City of Conroe has a ‘Meet Your Council’ page with each official’s contact information and photo. Katy also has a profile page for each council member, but the contact information is a generic email not specific to any council member. Jersey Village has an individual email for each council member and a button that allows visitors to send an email to all of them at the same time.

“In a lot of ways, they (governments) don't have to care about the user experience because they know that we need them in order to accomplish something that we often legally have to accomplish,” Rodwell said. “If they were trying to attract business, attract us as customers, they'd have some real vested interest in improving.”

What Users Want

Locally, some government website features stand out.

Harris County’s website includes a button that reads ‘Click here for slow connection.’ Once clicked, the page refreshes and hides the 311 search bar and lead image, focusing instead on text links. That helps residents with older devices or slower internet connections access the site, according to a representative for the county’s Universal Services Department.

The website, logo and branding were created in-house, meaning the county did not have to rely on an external vendor.

Several area cities use outside vendors to design and maintain their website.

Sugar Land, which averaged 7,888 daily views in the last 12 months, is one of them. 

Carlos Hernandez, assistant director for the city’s communications and community engagement department, said about 40 people across the city are website administrators.

One of their main priorities: Looking at user behavior.

“What are people calling for? Why are they asking for such information? That type of data is also taken into consideration as we make decisions on what's in the home page,” Hernandez said.

Beyond looking at website analytics and 311 data, they also conduct focus groups and surveys. Hernandez’ advice to other smaller municipalities is,  "Start small but make sure that content is updated.”

Other websites get creative with their content.

La Porte’s home page has a chatbot called ‘Ask Sylvan’ where users can ask questions and easily search for information. The logo for Sylvan is a seagull.

Sugar Land includes a relocation guide detailing how newcomers can start water service, learn about trash and recycling collection, area schools and recreational amenities.

Easy to Understand

Researchers say that solely uploading information onto a webpage does not go far enough and there should be a focus on simplifying content and making it easy to understand.

Shortening sentences, breaking up text with descriptive headers and making use of bullet points are the top recommendations Woodbury advises her government clients.

“With those three steps, they have probably improved their readability by a couple of grades,” said Woodbury, who is also founder of the Department of Civic Things.

Woodbury uses a software application to test readability. When text is entered, the app provides color-coded feedback regarding sentence complexity and reading level.

The Landing used the app on budget documents posted on various area government websites. Many of the documents were written for a person with a ninth grade-and-above reading level, with numerous sentences marked as difficult to read.

For example, Houston Mayor Whitmire’s message to citizens in the proposed 2025 budget was rated at a Grade 14 readability. Of the 35 sentences in it, 19 were noted as ‘very hard to read’.

For example, this 51-word sentence reads at a post-graduate level, according to the software: “My administration has already started working with stakeholders to ensure TIRZs are supporting priority services and facilities used to deliver them, implementing cost-sharing, expanding and collaborating the use of the city’s law enforcement agencies while continuing to deliver and improve services, focusing on public safety, and improving infrastructure for the City.

Baytown’s budget transmittal letter reads at a 12th-grade reading level. League City’s rated a 10th-grade level. The Metropolitan Transit Authority and the Port of Houston Authority were at 8th and 10th, respectively.

“If a person doesn't understand information on the website, the person cannot make important decisions,” said Dr. Natalya Matveeva, faculty director at the Institute for Plain English Research and Study at the University of Houston Downtown.

“We live in Houston, Texas, one of the most diverse metropolitan areas. We have people from so many different countries coming to the United States and a lot of them speak English as a second language,” she said. “So, plain language allows for communication that is direct, simple, and accessible.”

Readability

A 2010 law requires federal agencies to implement plain-language measures, but there is no similar requirement at the local level.

“Plain language training is the best bang for your buck training,” Woodbury said. “(It) will help you write better web content. It’ll also help you write better emails, and you’ll probably be a better spouse.”

Another aspect of readability is format. On all of the web pages surveyed by the Landing, PDFs were the norm for viewing dense information, such as budgets. Content designers say PDFs (Portable document Format) should be a thing of the past because they can be hard to read on mobile phones. 

So, how do Houston-area local government websites stack up? Are they accessible? Secure? How do they perform?

To determine whether websites are following best practices, Luke and Elias Fretwell created a program called ScanGov that evaluates government websites and assigns them letter grades A through F.

"There's no unifying thing that says, ‘This is what government websites should have.’ So, we started to build that,’ said Luke Fretwell, who also maintains GovFresh, a media and innovation lab focused on the intersection of design, technology and democracy.

The Fretwells now have a repository of scores for all 50 states and select cities.

At the request of the Houston Landing, 35 Houston-area government websites were evaluated by ScanGov. Most, like Houston and Harris County, received overall failing grades, though some scored well on content and performance. Many, however, failed to meet security and accessibility standards.

A 2024 federal law requires local governments to ramp up their accessibility offerings in the coming years.

Striving for accessible websites, Luke Fretwell said, forces improved design across the board.

“These shouldn’t be art projects. They really should be easy-to-access information-based websites.”