Thursday 18 March 2010

The European Council on the web

I was looking for the agenda of the next European Council when I wrote this post yesterday, which brought me to the website of the European Council for the first time - and I like it.

Different to most other European Union websites, this website actually has an appealing design. And more importantly, it is intuitively to use.

I was looking for information and I found them immediately. Documents are linked, the arrangement of the links and sidebars is simple and brings you to the places you actually want to go.

Some of the subpages - like this one - are a little text heavy which goes against the design of the front page, but that is okay.

What I couldn't find is a list of members of the European Council.

And please replace sentences like "The European Council elects its President by qualified majority." with sentences that actually tell what that means. No need to use Brussels jargon on a page that is probably directed to a broader public. At least link "qualified majority" to a web page that explains it.

But in general, I like the site; it's easy to use and simple in style.*

* One should notice that the European Council also is a much more simple institution than the Parliament, the Commission, the Council of Ministers which makes it easier to organise the information.

1 comments:

linotherhino said...

Hi Julien

For the European Council members as for anything, you have to go to the slightly non-intuitive EU Who is Who http://europa.eu/whoiswho/public/index.cfm?fuseaction=idea.hierarchy&nodeID=3540&lang=en