Boston begins testing new city Web site

City Hall yesterday launched pilot.boston.gov, to show off its migration from the current city Web site to something new and sparkly.

A key change is what City Hall is calling "topics," basically, collections of city resources keyed around the way we live, not how City Hall departments are organized. For example, if you own a car, you might need to know about paying your excise tax, when to move your car for street sweeping, how long you can keep a cone in your space after a snow storm, how to use your phone to pay for a parking space on Boylston Street. All of these things are run by different city departments. Why should you be forced to figure out where to go on a Web site to get a car-related question answered? Topics make up the answer.

That's the cool thing. The not-so-cool thing, at least at this very, very early stage, is that while the site looks good on a smartphone, it really kind of sucks on a desktop or laptop computer, which some of us old fogies still use.

What looks decent on a phone screen looks like some bloated brochureware site on a laptop: Fonts are way too big and there's oh so, so much blank space, forcing you to scroll and scroll past giant header images and giant introductory text messages to get to the information and links you really need.

This is one of the perils of "responsive" Web design (where you try to have a single set of templates that can recognize the device the user is on and then resize things to fit), especially when you design for mobile devices first; hopefully us geezers with our big screens won't be left completely behind when the new site launches for good.