How Should Government Web Sites Be Designed?

Wally Hartshorn asks: "Do Slashdot's readers have some examples of government Web sites that they particularly like or dislike? I'm the Web coordinator for the Web site of a state government agency, and I am looking for some ideas to improve our site's usefulness and design. I've read numerous articles about Web design, but they virtually all focus on commercial sites, where the information to be provided tends to be short and voluntary. There are many good ideas to take from these articles. However, I'm reasonably certain that there are some very different issues to consider when designing a site that is trying to present regulatory requirements (to an audience that would really rather be doing something else) rather than a site focused on selling or providing news. Any suggested good/bad examples to visit?" I think the key word for government sites is 'accessibility'. Do you all agree or disagree?

Comments

Some simple guidelines...

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking from experience, and from being married to someone who's legally blind, I have some suggestions.

1). Keep the use of graphics to an absolute minimum, and use as much plain ASCII text as possible. Every graphic you use increases the load time, and will make it that much more likely that your visitor(s) will lose patience and go elsewhere.

2). If you must use graphics, use text meta-tags so that screen-reading (text-to-speech) software, such as Jaws, can make sense of what's there.

3). Avoid animation in graphics. If you can't say what you need to with plain ole' text, a simple graphic, or a combo of the two, no amount of animated fireworks or envelopes will help.

4). Do NOT, under ANY conditions, tailor the page to be specific to a particular browser for viewing! Adhere as closely as possible to HTML standards so that the page(s) will be readable on ANY browser, even a text-based system such as Lynx.

Thankfully, this lets out using a lot of Micro$platt's bloat-ware.

5). On that subject: Don't use Bill-ware for your server. If you do, you'll end up with more bugs than a bait store, and more security holes than a brick of swiss cheese.

Use NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Linux for the base OS, and Apache for the HTML server package itself. There's a reason that the Unix-based Apache holds 60%+ of the web server market, and it's not because of good marketing. ;-)

6). If your site is more complex than a few pages, install a good solid search engine.

7). Remember the KISS (Keep it simple, s----d) principle: A web server that was a nightmare to set up is likely to be a nightmare to maintain.

Good hunting!

the scary thing about the IRS site..

[Anonymous Coward]

..is that it tries to be funny. Trust me, when a govt. bureaucracy that can crush you like an insignificant insect tries to be hilarious, it is in pretty bad taste.

Just present the facts and try to reduce the misery. Keep the info easy to access and brief. Nobody goes to a govt. website for *fun*.

(anonymous but paying his taxes, yet scared of the govt. actually, I haven't filed for my fucking refund for a year, it sucks being born with a procrastinating personality, let me tell ya)

Re:Here's an idea

[vipw]

are you really that stupid?

gov't websites need to present data in an accessable format. .txt pages would do that fine, html would do it fine. flashy garbage wouldn't, it's that simple.

Please use common file formats

[doug]

A few years ago I needed some IRS forms but they were all self-extracting ZIP files. That sucked. I was running (and still do) Linux at home, and that was an unpleasant surprise. Fortunately there are tools for handling this, but since I had to pay per-minute connection charges (I was in France at the time), I didn't like surfing any more than necessary. Especially when it was because someone made assumptions about what OS/environment citizens would be using.

To keep a long story short, stick to well known formats. Although much of the world is using PCs, not everyone is.

Also, please be responsive to email. Even if it is just "we got it, but to save your tax dollars, we won't contact you directly". I sent several complaints to the IRS feedback address, but never heard a peep from them. Nothing like that to make us citizens love and respect our public servents.

And to a lesser extent, please avoid eye and ear candy. Not everyone has fat broadband access, nor are all connections free/fixed cost.

Re:Usefulness is important

[Jeremy Erwin]

The New Jersey Transit Page provides a very strong example of what not to do. Half the time, the links don't work. The travel advisory page is almost completely in bold face, negating the very purpose of bold facing. The "Virtual Terminal" is an inapropriate metaphor, and besides, the image maps are broken. I'm not sure why the web designer thinks audio and video files of trains, buses, and airports are so important. Maybe the GAO could highlight it site with sounds of people typing or shuffling papers..

Re:Slash

[EricTheRed]

Our's here has parts based on slash (took the ideas and rewrote it in PHP and PostgreSQL).

http://www.digitalmaidstone.co.uk/ Peter

Tell me about it

[EricTheRed]

We have 3 servers running digitalmaidstone. 2 are Linux with Apache/PHP on one and Altavista on the other. The third is NT running MS/SQL7 but IIS proved too problematical, so we have apache & php on that box as well.

Apache/PHP beats the hell out of IIS/ASP any day.

USPTO

[Seumas]

Actually, the United States Patent Office has a quite useful and well designed website.

I've never seen a useful or user-friendly DMV, State Employment Division or almost any other governemnt owned website. In fact, it seems like most government sites are specifically designed to be as confusing and useless as possible by junior high school students with the specific intent to sink beneath mediocrity.
---
seumas.com

Re:Canadian way of doing things...

[c]

It does occur to me that I may have been a little harsh in my initial criticism, so let's talk about what the CLF does right.

It stresses accessibility, to the point that it requires compliance with W3C guidelines. This is good.

As a Unix person, I especially like the emphasis on accessible data formats (i.e. anything meeting W3C specs). In our organization, we tend to use the interpretation that Microsoft formats aren't allowed.

Canada being a bilingual country, it stresses that, to the point that even stuff like 404 messages have to be bilingual and that you can switch between languages at any time in your browsing. Technically, this is a bit harder to accomplish than straight english, but it's a really nice point to have.

The resulting pages are cleaner than 90% of things on the net in terms of usability for the normal user.

I'm really just pissed off that they got so close, but then blew it in the details.

c.

Re:Canadian way of doing things...

[c]

I work for the Canadian government, and I think that the CLF is crap. It's better than a lot of stuff, but still crap.

For example, page layout is specced out down to the exact pixel. We all know that this is bad, and I'm sure PDA users with 140x140 screens will be happy to know that content is NOT ALLOWED TO EXIST IN THE LEFT 150 PIXELS.

Sure, the CLF is supposed to result in sites that will fit in 640x480. What he doesn't mention is that the CLF won't produce sites that really work at any other resolution. Yup, if you're browser is less than 640x480, you're horizontally scrolling. If it's bigger, well, everything after the 640'th pixel is whitespace.

People will slower computers and connections will be happy to know that the oh-so-accessible Canadian web sites are loaded with tables (for layout purposes only, of course), blank filler GIFs (http://canada.gc.ca/main_e.html has not less than 10 blank GIFs of various sizes...like someone never heard of the width and height tags), text as images, and things like institutional logos that can't be clicked on (no, you can't click on the Canada "wordmark", you have to click on the bit of text below it that says "Canada Site".

The CLF also dictates e-mail requirements. Neat stuff like all e-mail should have an image representing the institution and the Canada wordmark. Like I really want to get an e-mail with 500 bytes of header, 133 bytes of text, and 4k of useless images.

Don't get me started about the wonderfully EASY TO REMEMBER bilingual URLs that the CLF requires, nice stuff like www.cio-dpi.gc.ca/clf-upe, www.tbs-sct.gc.ca, etc. So now I'm supposed to know acronyms in two languages? Like www.cio.gc.ca/clf/ and www.dpi.gc.ca/upe/ are so hard to implement?

The people who came up with this pile of shit should be required to write out the entire contents of useit.com 100 times for their sins.

c.

Re:Canadian way of doing things...

[c]

"Web enabled PDAs and cell-phones (including WebTV, which is is also smaller then 640 pixels) only account for less then 2% of web access (from StatMarket's update last month anyhow)... Is it really worth it? *shrug*"

I've been in that 2%. It's worth it to me. Also remember that 2% or the web access market is one hell of a lot of people.

"Well, for me, it doesn't say you CAN'T have it clickable... so I made it so... I think most people know to click on logos nowadays..."

They don't explicitly say in the CLF body, but there's a "corrective" FAQ which states that institutional signatures and wordmarks can't be used for navigation.

c.

My fav. government website...

[mattkime]

my favorite government website is www.whitehouse.com

Love the design and quick access to information.

talk to the military

[mstone]

if you need to communicate a bunch of technical information to people who mostly don't give a crap, and it's important that those people remember that information in critical situations, you could do worse than to use military training materials as your guide.

it doesn't matter what your biases are one way or another, anyone who takes a serious look at the military's educational materials will have to admit that they've spent one hell of a lot of time and money finding ways to communicate effectively, and have *tested* those techniques extensively.

Re:Should the government be spend money on website

[Servo]

I don't agree... a website is a great way for a citizen to get information (if done right) about the agency, or how to do XYZ, like filing a tax return, etc. (The IRS's site is fairly confusing, however, but at least all the info is there)

Having a website allows people to get self service, cutting down on the hassle of dealing with an agency. (California lets you renew your car tag online, but in Florida we get to stand in a line for two hours to be told we didn't bring everything we needed.

Re:Think like the user.

[moniker]

My favorite example of why you should design for what people do, not what you want them to do.

http://www.baddesigns.com/sidewalk.html

A good design....

[Cerb]

The City of Fort Worth Texas has a nice site. http://ci.fort-worth.tx.us

Re:Canadian way of doing things...

[Keith McClary]

My gripe with gov.ca sites is that they are always breaking links by fooling around with URL's and domains. This has the side effect of filling up the search engines with broken links (like the proverbial elephant, search engines never forget). If you find a good link, chances are it's an orphan page like this weather forecast for May 1

What?

[KFury]

The web co-ordinator for a large government agency has "read numerous articles on web design"? Hmm... not to be harsh, but doesnt it seem that a more qualified person should be in that kind of role?

Don't mind me, I'm just bitter because it's finals week.

Kevin Fox

Re:Grumbles about www.jpl.nasa.gov

[matth]

I think part of the reason that some of the nasa sites look almost gopher-ish is because they have been around for ages, and no one has taken the time or effort to update them. If you look at them, they look like the nasa (and many other sites) did back in like 1995, or so... I think they probably just haven't re-designed the site... so it still looks old, gopherish, etc.

Re:Accessibility issues

[matth]

Let people decide this with their browsers, and never specify sizes in pixels. It looks awful on small
monitors (say, PDAs, or Grandma's 640x480 monitor), and it's awful AND hard to read on a
1600x1200 display.

Sorry, I'd have to disagree with you here.. if you make a table that is 480 pixels across you know it will be readable on Grandmat's monitor and also on a 1024x768... plus any graphics I put in.. will look right... on the other hand, if I go an specify a percent.. it may look fine on your 1024x768.. but when I go and look at it on grandma's 640x480 my pictures may actually OVERLAP my text because there is no room and the picture is too big!

Not like Florida's

[Squirrel Killer]

I went to Florida's site after to election day mess to find some pretty simple things, like the election returns, state code, etc..., and was amazed at how amazingly hard it was to actually find anything. Sure the design is nice, but a link to real content was impossible to find.

In the end, I went to Yahoo's state government section to find a deep link into the Florida Sec. of State page. Not a good result for a "front" page when your vistors have to leave your site to find what is already in your site's perview.

-sk

UK open.gov.uk W3C Standards

[Chris Croome]

AS much as I hate to say anything positive about the British Government (RIP etc) I often point people to the standards that the www.open.gov.uk site uses:

open.gov.uk - W3C standards http://www.open.gov.uk/services/standards.htm

Every time I look at them I'm shocked buy how good they are!

--

New Mexico...

[Pahroza]

New Mexico's state site is decent. You can even renew your vehicle registration via an online form and a cc #. However, the deeper you get into the site, the design and functionality starts to suffer.

State of Alaska Webpage

[Leareth]

Isn't bad. Usually has a pretty clean, clear design. The employee directory works like a charm. However, the general search is pretty much useless,

http://www.state.ak.us

Re:Accessibility issues

[Richard Lamont]

> Instaed, specify "Arial,Helvetica,Geneva"

Wrong. Specify "Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,sans-serif". The list should always end with one of the five generic font families.

Re:Search!

[Aqualung]

Much easier said than done. Trying to develop a coherent method to archive state information is extremely difficult, mostly due to poor web page and web site design. I can't tell you how many times I've seen links on our state's pages to HREF's such as "C:\\My Documents\some-agency\policies.html" and the like.
----
Dave
MicrosoftME®? No, Microsoft YOU, buddy! - my boss

Re:Check out the UK government web site

[spudnic]

The part of this page I like the best:

Usability: This site allows users to bind keyboard strokes to actions. This WAI initiative is not supported by Netscape.

damn.

A site in the USA???

[I R A Aggie]

In which case, you have to keep in mind three little letters:

ADA - Americans with Disabilities Act

Your pages will need to be accessible to those with handicaps. You probably should coordinate with legal consel on what that entails.

James

Re:Accessibility issues

[PapaZit]

Almighty Nielsen would disagree with you where screen fonts are concerned

Then he disagrees with almost every other typesetting usability study and style guide in existance. Perhaps his studies are based on sales sites (where there are lots of proper names) or it's an issue with the low resolution of computer monitors (where the serifs are "extra junk" rather than visual cues).

I think that the enemy of the good for onscreen body font selection is the unconventional.

After reading this a few times, I agree with you. For me, "conventional" is the user's default browser font(s).

--

Inside perspective

[X-Nc]

My personal favorite government web site is the US Army Publishing Agency's web site. OC, this might be related to the fact that I single-handedly built it from scratch and ran it from Nov '95 through Feb '99.

For those who are involved with the US Federal Government web sites there is an excelent resource available for you. It's called the DoD Webmasters list, though it isn't limited to just "dot mil" users. Information on this list can be found at http://www.army.mil/webmasters/faq. The archives are available there, too.

We have had lots of very good discussions on the issues of design and functionality in there.

---

Re:Accessibility issues

[BZ]

Why limit the width?? You do realize that 200-500 pixels is _tiny_ on any hi-res monitor, right? An it makes it very hard to read since every three words are on a separate line...

USPS website

[BZ]

See the USPS website for ideas on how _not_ to do a site. Too much javascript, fails to show at all on anything that's not Windows or Mac last I checked, hard to find information.

Census Bureau

[Skater]

The US Census Bureau has a decent site. They've won awards for accessibility, and there's a lot of information stashed in there.

Don't clutter up the page

[edko]

In general what irritates me about a web site
is one with a lot of links compactly packed
together. I personally rather click through
a page or two tunneling through categories rather
than squinting my eyes and reading columns of text.

But maybe that's me.

ed

Govt web sites that suck

[Reziac]

A bad example: http://assessor.co.la.ca.us/

It's painfully slow at 50k, it will only speak to the latest and greatest browser, half the time parts don't work, it locks up my browser the first time I access it (but not the 2nd time), the database doesn't always produce relevant answers, etc, etc. etc. But the worst thing is that I wait 30-60 seconds after every click, just to get to the next thing to click. One day I had to print out some county maps from there and it took me over an hour just to get the dozen smallish graphics.

Re:Accessibility issues

[thogard]

If its not readable in Lynx, then its illegal according to the Americans with Disabilitys act.

Re:Thanks, then Redundant Redundancy

[Kool Moe]

.pdf is platform dependent? I'm not experienced with all the OS options, but afaik, .pdf is available for Mac/Win/Linux/and most flavors of unix?

I TOTALLY agree to provide .csv files. I refuse to install Excel or Quicken on my home machines.

Re:Check out the UK government web site

[Shirotae]

But the Central Office of Information site is terrible; it is a good example of how to confuse the visitor. It shows that the site designer thinks he is clever at scripting, but he is really totally out of touch with the needs of the visitors to the site.

Whatever else you do, don't make that mistake.

Re:Step 1: Listen to Jakob Nielsen

[gonzocanuck]

Why is this marked Funny 4? am I missing something? Feel free to mark me OT

----

Re:Accessibility? Call Bobby!

[Multics]

Bobby is excellent. Just use it and it wouldn't hurt to give them a little money to help their efforts.

Also be sure that the site works OK in Lynx, a unix-based all text (no graphics) web browser. Many vision impared people use a reader based from Lynx (& Lynx-like) to have the site read to them.

It seems to me you're already on the right road just by asking.

Make information findable

[Corydon76]

Most of the government web sites I've had to deal with don't use huge images, large text pages, etc., as per the general recommendations. That's all good.

However, I've found that the most problematic area of most sites is making stuff findable. That means a couple of things. First, a site index. Obvious, I suppose, but many of them subdivide by departments which have access to post information on the web server. Rather, it should be the logical division of the departments within the organization.

The biggest part of making stuff findable, however, is a search. Two main things about this. First, the search box should DEFAULT to searching ONLY YOUR WEB SITE. Too many sites out there have genericized search engines that search the entire friggin Internet. Your site is not a portal. Don't try to make it into one. People came to your site for the information on your site, not so they could be redirected to Excite.

The second part of the search is granularity. It should search for EXACT PHRASES, but not ONLY exact phrases. You should also have the ability to search for KEYWORDS, but in the case of a general search, only after you've done the exact phrase search. And finally, SPELLCHECK the search. In summary, do your search several times, if necessary, over an ever widely increasing search parameters.

Agreed: avoid font tag abuse

[droleary]

It is getting downright disgusting the number of sites I have come across recently that make excessive use of size=1 for their font tags. And I'm not talking about the copyright at the bottom or some nothing note under a graphic, but large amounts of text they actually want you to read! In whose mind is it a good idea to put the most important text in the smallest font possible?

Accesibility + Usability.

[danboy]

I believe government websites should follow usability and accesability rules rather strictly.

First off common interface should be devised for all .gov sites.

Force all sites to use em for font sizes, black on grey or black and white sites, minimal graphics, and a common navigation scheme.

All Documents should degrade gracefully and allow users on any platform or browser to access them.

Actually they should all look like USEIT.com ;)

Re:Accessibility issues

[David Byers]

Limiting text width to a set number of pixels is a bad idea. You have no way of knowing how large a font I use or what kind of resolution my screen has.

If I have a very large font, lines will be too short. If I have a very small font, lines will be too long, even if I use a very narrow browser window.

A government site should cater to *everyone*, not just those who use the standard settings in their standard browser.

www.irs.gov - ouch

[johnhebert]

Well, one thing you can say for it: it's consistent. It's been the same design for about 4 years now.

There is a common misconception about the government being some sort of cohesive organization that has a common set of standards for managing data, both on dead wood and digital, when the truth of the matter is that most govt agencies are pretty autonomous of each other. When the WWW came along, each agency kinda struck out in its own direction as far as constructing websites went.

I think it would be better in the long run to establish some basic XHTML design standards for govt website design in that it would pave the way for the usage of common XML schemas for publish data like population stats, etc.

I'll bet the problem is that experienced designers are busy making more money elsewhere. Once the technology bubble on Wall St. deflates enough, you will see those experienced designers working for govt agencies and smaller businesses, which will then make an XML framework that the majority of people can benefit from.

My Observations

[Local Loop]

Good Government Websites:

• The IRS
• The US Postal Service

What makes a good government website for me is lot's of practical advice on dealing with the agency. Many agencies just post scanned regulations and leave it at that. That's fine for the lawyers, but most of us need good english translations, with as many examples as possible.

The front page should always contain:

• A full text search box, ideally with a link to a full featured search page.
• The top level heirarchical listing of categories
• A link to a (frequently updated) FAQ, with links to other agencies where relevant. Example: Going to the Dept. of Commerce, I could reasonably expect to find encryption export regulations, but that responsibility was recently transferred to the Bureau of Export Administration.
• A short summary of recent news happenings/hot topics at the agency
• A short, clear statement of the agencies' areas of responsibility

In short, give people multiple ways to find the info they want, and try to anticipate their questions in the FAQ

Also, actively solicit feedback, becuase you'll be surprised at the types of things your users want to do that you never anticipated

Ack, gotta run, please forgive the lack of proofreading

-Loopy

Re: www.dcvote.com

[Cy Guy]

Yes, accessibility is a good keyword.


I don't know if you are the webmaster for the site, but they have a lot to learn about accessibility.

There are 21 instances of Priority 1 accessibility (no alt text for images or image map links) on the homepage according to Bobby.

If the goal of the organization is equality, then they need to be doubly conscious of not providing equal access to the page for ALL users.

Re:Accessibility issues

[grazzy]

why shouldnt cookies be used? cookies are not neccessary evil..

The Texas State homepage, slightly OT....

[invenustus]

You mentioned a web page of the State of Texas. I know this is offtopic but I can't resist showing this to people. This is not a joke.

They have this Execution Info page where you can see a list of everyone Texas has executed since 1982, with pictures of them and their last words. Now maybe you're saying "Gee Mark, this all isn't morbid enough for me!" Well guess what? You can see last meal requests for all 239 of them. Nobody will ever accuse this bunch of having sparse web content.

----

Don't do it like the swiss gov.

[chregu]

it's an awful layout, no consistency throughout everything und you don't find anything, though there's a lot of information on their sites. see it for yourself at www.admin.ch

The gov did this?

[clwells]

http://www.airforce.com pretty cool.

Re:Best aren't open to the public

[LRJ]

Then you either don't have flash installed or it's the wrong version.

Site looks pretty good, much better than most government sites I've seen, though, as many people have already mentioned, because it's flash you limit the people who can view the site.

Grumbles about www.jpl.nasa.gov

[decipher_saint]

They should get some consistantcy between the pages. Particularilty the mission pages:

For Example:
The Cassini-Hyugens page looks pretty good:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/

The Voyager Project Home Page looks like crap (but has good info):
http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/voyager.html

And none of these pages looks like the root:
www.jpl.nasa.gov

(With the possible exception of the Galileo page, BTW Galileo is celebrating it's fifth year in orbit of Jupiter):
http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/

Consistently good or consistently bad, I don't care as long as there is consistency between the pages...

...uhh otherwise good site ;-)

Capt. Ron

Re:Check out the UK government web site

[rkent]

My favorite part is this, in little tiny print along the bottom:

The leading UK government web site since 1994

Do they have a lot of competition for this honor?
: )

Minimalism and Content

[brink]

Some of these things may have been posted already, but I'll put them down just in case.

• Make your interface consistent in terms of navigation. American Memory from the Library of Congress is a really neat idea. It's fairly well organized, but is really graphics heavy and the navigation changes from page to page, easily confusing you as to where you are and how to get where you want to go.
• In contrast, the Library of Congress Online has a lot of content and the interface stays mostly the same (as far as searching goes). However, when viewing it I feel as if I need to be trained as a librarian in order to find anything. Avoid using terminology and definitions that you might find understandable because you're working there, but that the average Jane or Joe user wouldn't necessarily be able to comprehend.
• Categorization. The IRS' website, as has been noted, is rather difficult to navigate. Again, one needs to know the exact governmental terminology to find stuff. Your categorization method might need to be some other format than one used internally. For example, you might find the ordering
  Residential Documents -> Tax Forms -> Family -> Income Level -> 30,000
  to be self-explanatory, but it might not be the best ordering so that the average person can find information.
  Try to keep category depth to at most three levels if you can manage it.
• Programming-wise, it may be good to store the design and content in separate places. Have each subpage simply contain content and just include the design either at run or compile time. When you've got as much information and as many documents as a govt. site typically has, this is IDEAL for when you want to change the design (which means the file containing the design). This can significantly add to the load however, so make sure you're ready for it.
• Make sure you have the bandwidth and machine horsepower to handle the site. One thing I've noticed with almost any .gov site is that they are extremely slow. This is as much part of the user experience as the layout and organization.

The other thing I strongly suggest is that you do incremental useability testing with average people, e.g. non-governmental citizens. Get your family and friends (or at least people from disparate agencies) to look at your sketches of the design, design templates, staged development sites... You need to know that people can actually use your design. Ask your test subjects if they would know what to do if they were presented with such and such a page. If they say, "huh?", you haven't done your job.

The goal of your site (I'm assuming) is to provide information to users. Just try to realize that too much information at once is overwhelming and makes people go away. The only place where you should have lots and lots of text is in the actual document or page the user is looking for.

That's all I can think of right now. I hope this helps.

This is easy.

[-=[ SYRiNX ]=-]

• Adhere 100% to standards. This means you need to implement proper accessibility, too.
• Use only text. No graphics. The site's purpose is to be functional, not pretty.
• Provide a FULL and FAST keyword search engine of the entire site.
• Provide e-mail addresses and phone numbers of REAL PEOPLE I can contact for TIMELY answers to questions or problems I may have, and KEEP THIS INFO UP-TO-DATE. Ensure 24/7/holidays access to these contacts so that if I get an urgent question at 10pm Friday night on Christmas weekend that I don't have to wait until Wednesday morning to get a reply to my e-mail.
• Get a convenient domain name for the site. http://www.doe.us.gov/~loans/terms/cgi-bin/script. asp?128973987123-1293871-1293819283&page=welcome_t o_our_cool_site.html is NOT the kind of thing people want to have to remember.
• Get listed in all the major search engines such as Yahoo, Google, WebCrawler, and AtlaVista.
• Host the site on hefty enough hardware that it won't give me a pathetic 0.8kb/sec on my DSL or T1 connection.

Use the guides for danish goverment websites...

[dybdahl]

The danish government websites are very restricted in how they may be designed. Generally, there are two important requirements often overlooked by commercial websites:

1) Must be accessible by browsers for handicapped users.
2) Documents must use a subset of HTML with specific meta tags in order to be compatible, searchable etc.

Not a .gov but a .mil

[orty.com]

I saw this on a site last night...it's a site for Anthrax (the chemical, not the band), encouraging soldiers to get the vacination. It's got a pretty fancy flash front end.

http://www.anthrax.osd.mil/Flash_interface/intro.h tml

A couple I like

[twos]

Here are a few local government sites that I like.

Ninja-Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida

Orange County Florida

I may be biased because I started Orange County's and now work for the Ninth Circuit (not in web design).

Both sites have won a variety of awards, and they offer quite a bit of information that is useful to the public.

handicap accessibility required?

[berticus]

everybody is touting accessibility to the information on your site, i'm pretty sure you have to go one step further on government sites and make them universally accessible. this means making it so it works reasonably well for blind folks who are surfing through some sort of vocalizer or colorblind folks who can't see your spiffy multicolored buttons or whatnot. More info here:

http://seddmznt.nysed.gov/cio/access/statutoryrequ irements.html

This is a page for the New York State Goverment, but they mention federal regulations they're supposed to follow and have some good links on how to design with those who are handicapped in mind.

Slash

[foondog]

They should run Slash..

FoonDog

Re:Slash

[johneltoro]

funny, that's exactly what I was thinking. I was perusing CNN's site and getting quite annoyed by the left-to-right scroll action, multitude of ad graphics, pop-up locale 'where are you coming from: us|botswana|uraguay|albequergue' windows, etc. and I popped over to slashdot and thought 'ah, how nice! now here is a dynamic page that doesnt require me to inflate my browsers proportions to kingdom come! so sensible...'. then I happened to see this post

New Mexico State Judiciary

[Thorson]

Check out the New Mexico Judiciary site.

Experiences working in an NGO

[nwetters]

In the UK, it seems that the quango's are the most poorly equiped to deal with new media. I worked as Electronic Publishing Producer at FEDA (Further Education Development Agency), which has recently changed its name to The Learning and Skills Development Agency. I'm now out of the place, happily coding Perl for a dot-com that knows its arse from its elbow.

FEDA's IT team were recruited from further education colleges, most of which had not made the transition from IPX to TCP/IP. Because of the poor candidates attracted by low salaries, the staff were unmotivated and refused to get involved with any new IT projects that would increase their workload. The Internet strategy was therefore devolved to the publications department, who had plenty of experience in print, but no experience of building a webserver (I was learning as I went along). From talking with blokes from other agencies, it seems common practice for IT departments to avoid involvement in Internet projects at all costs.

However, all capital expenditure for IT had to be agreed by the head of IT, who was firmly commited to NetWare as the Network OS. It was only by slight of hand that I secured funding for a Compaq box, which myseriously transformed itself into a Linux/Apache webserver one night.

In late 1998, FEDA secured a (£200k) government tender to run the Key Skills Support Programme - most of the cash was earmarked to build a website and a small web database. As soon as real cash had been sniffed, the IT department took control and started hiring Oracle contractors. After nine months work, they launched the pig-ugly beast, which promptly started attracting in excess of 30 page impressions a day!

Towards the end of the Key Skills projects, the funds ran dry (inevitably), so earlier plans for an upgrade system for the database, and a design pitch for the website, were canned. However, no one seemed to care - the money had been spent, and a website and database had been delivered.

I left, and my webserver was converted initially to Novell, then to NT. Here's what I learned at FEDA:

1. Government has unrealistic budgets for IT projects (either way too high, or way too low).
2. Government tenders are not won by the best companies, but by agencies (closely linked to government departments) that need something to do.
3. Specs for Government web projects are too loose
4. No plans are made for project maintenance
5. Visitor projections are unrealistic [Millennium Dome, anyone?]

C/AIM Web Style Guide

[phrawzty]

The Centre for Advanced Instructional Media at Yale has published a book in both online and paper form. It is entitled Web Style Guide, and has been an invaluble resource to me and my students (i'm an IT Technologies instructor).

It assumes you already have some understanding of many of the topics it covers (i.e. it's not a guide for rank newbies) - which is one of the things that makes it good. It covers everything from interface design, to information chunking, and beyond. Best part? Free.

What it isn't, is an HTML guide. You'll learn no HTML as a result of this manual. What it is, is a theoretical and conceptual (with practical examples and follow-through) look at what designing for the Web is all about.

I would definatly recommend that every web designer, or anybody who works with the web, give it a read. If you're interested in making a government website, you should find a lot of the manual speaks to the types of concerns you have.


.------------ - - -
| big bad mr. frosty
`------------ - - -

Design for the users, not for the agency

[Infonaut]

I spent 18 months as the webmaster/web designer for the Corporation for National Service, a relatively small (about 500 employees) agency. I created the structure of the site, and although there have been some cosmetic changes since my departure two years ago, the structure remains essentially intact for better or for worse.

The biggest difficulties I found were usually not as much technical as they were administrative. Though nobody answered to me, I had to obtain cooperation for content management from the people running the various departments of the agency. Each department, of course, wanted to promote and present their content in a different manner, suited to their own internal operating methods and/or politics.

Essentially I had to become a user advocate, filtering every request to post content through the lens of the user. One constant was that internal clients could only see the website from their perspective within the organization. They wanted the structure of the site to mirror the structure of the organization.

Stay away from this at all costs - it's poison! As a user, I don't care whether annual reports are the responsibility of the Office of External Affairs or the Office of Transnational Affairs. All I care about is that I can find the annual report and get out of the site. Government sites are not entertaining - they can be easy to use, but people looking for entertainment on the web are going to The Onion, not to government sites.

In summary, think of yourself as a person on the street who needs information from your organization. You just want the info. Provide everything you possibly can in printable formats. PDF forms with fill-in boxes, while a pain to prepare, result in forms that users can fill in well regardless of their horrible penmanship. Give people direct communication when they ask you questions, and have the reply be from an actual person, not an autoresponder. This alone really impacted users' view of the organization. I received many emails from users thanking me for giving a face to the faceless agency

My guess is that you're understaffed and are being given contradicting mandates - that seems to be the way things work in government, and your site will doubtless reflect some of those tradeoffs. I wish you the best of luck!

Make things obvious

[erinlee]

The Canadian government is pretty good with it's web sites, but I still shudder in horror of one website/presentation devoted to income tax law changes. We were looking if there had been a change to capital gains taxes or something else similarly specific. The document was set up with no index, about one paragraph of text per page and big infographics throughout, and some other politically expedient tax change was droned on about for pages on end. After clicking through about thirty or more next> buttons (by which point most would have given up), we finally stumbled upon one uninformative sentence on the topic written in happy press-release speak.

They were obviously following a commercial news-site layout: designed for maximum banner ad usage and nice fluffy buzzword happytalk.

Anyways, my point: blatantly obvious navigation (e.g. don't make people guess if fishing licenses are under "wildlife" "conservation" or "resources"), indexing and navigational redundancy, and have the hardcore documentation up there alongside the press releases and "for dummies" executive summaries. Don't be afraid to link to other relevant government agencies either. Plus, go for super simple design: it's far more important to have compatibility with ancient browsers and 14.4 modem speeds than a slick, hip commercial interface that will look painfully dated in two years. Unless you're trying to draw companies into a high-tech mentorship program or something else where there's a specific need to look all whiz-bangy to make an impression.

Here is a PERFECT example of ... well, you look

[rosewood]

http://www.anthrax.osd.mil/Flash_interface/intro.h tml
I think it speaks for itself

use your community to build the site

[Offwhite98]

I am on a team which produces a city guide and we work with various government and business organizations in the area. I find that often government and business websites go the cheapest route due to budget limitions but there are ways around that.

For starters, given a big enough community you can have local web development and ad agencies bid on the design for the site. You will likely get a very good deal, perhaps even free if that firm is allowed to take credit for building the site. They are motivated to produce the most useful and attractive site possible as it is going to a major part of their promotion once they win the project.

Locally, here in Milwaukee, a national web firm actually paid 1 million dollars for the rights to produce the Brewers website. They wanted to have the exposure through doing multiple sports sites.

Also locally, we have the annual Summerfest which is a large 2 week event which features all kinds of music. It is promoted nationally and every year they allow local companies to submit designs for the site and each one is reviewed and a firm is then chosen over the course of a few months to do the site.

And after you do have a site, you may want content to enhance what you initally offer. The site I work on is OnMilwaukee.com and we offer event information and reviews and previews of various things around the city. A government site typically draws visitors looking for this information but does not have the resources to produce it. So they either provide links to our site for information or we develop a co-branded solution for them. It then benefits us both.

One site is www.Ride.MCTS.com, the Milwaukee County Transit System website. They have several vistors and have a very nice site but wanted to offer more information. We set up a co-branded version of our site for them so that the following link goes to our site,but styles the header graphics to be a part of our website.

http://www.ridemcts.com/cityguide/index.asp

But our site usually looks like this...

http://www.onmilwaukee.com/index.html?cb_id=1

The co-branding offers content to their site in a way while it sends traffic to our site. The custom header for their site also provides navigation back to their website.

As far as content for the government site, that would depend on the organization. Typically contact and address information is very useful. (maps too) History of the organization and a calendar (agenda) is also very useful to see what the organization has done historically, recently and what it will do soon.

It is also nice to have a way to route people's comments and complaints to the proper department and person. This is basically a web form which sends an email, but the destination of the email is determined by the selections they make in the form. A form also allows for a short survey to collect some info. Then an automatic reply either by email or regular mail is sent. I sent a web form message to my congressman once. I got a letter in the mail with a business card. It made me feel like I was being heard and the adminstration was responsive. Email may work as well, but does not provide that real action is being taken.

MHO about gov sites

[11thangel]

Honestly, the government information websites should be set up more for like they are for informational purposes than for businesses. A while ago i checked out the web site for the CIA and it looked more like a private investigation firm where i send an email to sales@cia.gov and they stalk someone for the next month and give me all of their information. I can understand the "employment opportunities" sections, but the overall impression of the sites are often misleading.

Re:I've got a suggestion

[DuBois]

Don't forget to make the .gifs as big as possible. 1MB ought to be the minimum size since you really want a lot of resolution and color on these pictures. Everybody has a T1 line these days anyway.

Re:Sickening

[DuBois]

Don't forget that the National Socialists in Germany were democratically elected. And they're still considered to have been the finest example of fascism so far. Although I expect the Green Socialists to give them a good run for their money. :-)

review search logs

[martinflack]

1. Put a search box on the home page.
2. Log all searches.
3. Review the logs periodically.

Searches show you where your navigation is failing (especially on home page), or where you might need to add a Q&A to your FAQ.

W3 Standards

[Cupis]

Don't get me wrong, I do like the site, but they make a lot of the fact that they follow all known standards, but a quick look at http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.open. gov.uk shows that their front page throws up 10 errors - all because they have not even checked it against a validator. Had they checked it, they would have realised that they have neglected to put an explanation mark in their DOCTYPE declaration at the top of the page (they have used <DOCTYPE ... instead of <!DOCTYPE ...). It is a basic error, and one which certainly should have been noticed during their testing stage.

Paul.

My first thoughts on the subject...

[WowTIP]

Numbered, but in no specific order...

1) Like scotpurl said in an earlier comment. Have a good working search engine.

2) As important as content is that it is updated on a regular basis. Old inaccurate info on a gov. site will make it much less credible.

3) Get a good graphics designer. No one likes browsing an ugly, badly designed site.

4) Take paper, pencil and a couple of coworkers and brainstorm a layout of the site hierachy. How many subgroups are needed, what should they contain. What belongs in the site and not.

5) Relevant links to other departments with whom your department has connections.

6) No browser specific code. Preferably no Java or Javascript either. Use Opera as test browser. It follows most standards. If it works in Opera, it will probably work very well in IE/NS too.

7) If you have to use frames, make sure there is a way to get to the main page from every frame, if you enter the site the "wrong" way. *classic*

8) If the Law allows it, a contact list, with key persons in the organization. Photos are great.

9) A well written introductory page to your agency. Who are you? What are your purpose? When should I contact you? Who should I contact?

10) No pr0n! ;-)

--

"I'm surfin the dead zone

Yeah, but...

[WowTIP]

They should really hire some guy that know how to make transparent GIF:s... ;-)

--

"I'm surfin the dead zone

A good example

[john@iastate.edu]

www.whitehouse.com :) :) :)

Vatican City Official Site

[wunderhorn1]

I think The Pope ¥not Kurt the Pope, being the head of the Vatican city/state, has an excellent web site©

It presents you with a language selection then moves right on to the relevant information--including a site map, faq, and search© And the graphics are awesome© Such is the power of God©

The only bad thing it relies primarily on graphics for navigation, and while the holy webmaster does use alt= tags, they're all in Italian© Still, it looks great on Mozilla©

©©©©or did you mean U©S© Government webpages?


-the wunderhorn

Re:Accessibility issues

[Relic of the Future]

1) Limit the width that the text can flow -- do not allow it to expand to full browser width. Text should be in a table with a width of approx 200 - 500 pxls.

Ewww, yuck! Do no such thing! Keep text out of tables if possible, and avoid limiting anything's size by pixels. Why, what if my resolution is 1200x1600 and I like having larger fonts? Your 500-pixel table will be about 20 characters wide.

If you want to keep nice wide margins (which are a good thing to have), use style sheets to edit the p and/or blockquote> tags and do it in ems or %.

God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein

As long as it isn't like real.com

[grubby]

I think that any government site would beat real.com

Lessons from an experienced fool

[aengblom]

First, many things depend on the type of government website. Federal, state, and local of course will be very different. Similarly, IRS will be different from any of them. One local government website I've heard much praise about is the website for the City of Alexandria, Virginia.. The reason? Simple, navigatable, but most importanly it has lots of relevant and recent information.

List o suggestions:

Keep it simple. (Many users won't be totally familiar with the internet

Keep it updated! This means everyone must be involved, not just the webmaster.

Prominent, fast, simple but powerful and accurate search engine (in other words the best you can get your hands on). Many people visiting the site WON'T be there every day (presumably). There will (likely) be lots of data and information (if i know gov't sites). You need search capabilities!

Prominent "contact us" page. Place names, e-mails, phone numbers, addresses, fax numbers etc! Often the website isn't enough!

Find out and follow all rules for helping the disabled.

Ask yourself: 1. Who is coming to this website (Your website will serve different groups. Citizens, government officials, businesses, journalists etc). 2. Why are each of these groups coming to the website AND Why aren't these people calling, writing, or faxing. In other words, what is the web best at displaying that all other ways of contacting your orginization fail at. 3. What service could my organization provide through the web that it never has before. (Offer it :) ) 4. How can I break the totality of information into comprehendable subgroups.

Link to Firstgov.org

Australian "FCC" site fails to please...

[ivi]

The Australian Communications Authority (our FCC, but with offices that look more like those of exclusive advertising agencies... I'm not kidding!) has - in law the requirement to publish its license/frequency database.

Apparently, that wasn't such a popular law (from the gov'ts point of view).

The way it got implemented was like this:

If the number of hits on a search exceeded a threshhold - WHAMMO! - you don't get the chance to view your hits by pages of 25 each...

...you get NOTHING!

That's right... you don't get to see -any- of the hits at all.

'protecting large corporations from scrutiny by the public sound familiar...?

Re:What are the REQUIREMENTS?

[pac4854]

You heard correctly. The USDOJ issued an opinion on the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) several years ago that if a government entity conducts a portion of its business electronically, then that operation must meet the same accessibility requirements that would normally be expected of the "brick-and-mortar" business.

Sometimes you'll hear this referred to as "digital curb cutting", in reference to the cuts made in sidewalk edges to allow wheelchair access.

Check out www.gov.sg and www.sg

[TheLink]

I don't like the parts that _require_ javascript but it is worth a look.

Have fun,
Link.

Index your pages

[alanjstr]

One thing I wish more sites did well is to index their pages with keywords and summaries. Then, have a quality search engine for the site. How many times have you gone to a site looking for something that you know is there somewhere, but can't find it? Its good that you're doing planning and not just throwing something up ad-hoc, so take the time to do everything right.

Usefulness and usability

[karzan]

In a way, government web site designers have an advantage in usability, because they are not trying to advertise anything and therefore don't have to worry about such things as logo graphics. You can take advantage of that situation to preset information in a more usable way rather than a "flashy" way. I would recommend using almost no graphics and of course, since it's a government web site, it should be designed to be accessible by the disabled and also by people with any browser. Since you've got to include regulatory information, I would make it prominent, and it's also a good idea to be able to browse by section--a really good web site that does this is the California Legislative Counsel which provides a complete up to date database of all California laws.

I also think it's important to offer a lot of government services. Remember, the government is even more flooded with requests, paperwork, etc than any other organisation. So if you can provide services automatically over the web, like making appointments, filing requests, filing forms, obtaining forms, etc, then you as the webmaster have actually saved the taxpayers money! This may be the most important part. If every government organisation did this, it would cut down on their overhead significantly, and save us all some money.

interactivity?

[Jim Madison]

lots of folks have been commenting on making the massive amounts of govt info available and accessible, which seems like a 'no duh.'

my question is, should they provide interactivity? should you be able to post questions about documents, forms, legal code, pending legislation, etc.? Should there be spaces for citizens to discuss these things and help each other out?

just a thought.

Organize around the content not the bureaucracy

[JDeFontes]

During my brief stint working on a government web site a few years ago my biggest frustration was the insistence on making the information architecture reflect the organizational structure.

How is the average person supposed to know which office inside of what bureau in what administration is the one that has the content they're looking for?

And try to avoid putting the director's picture on the home page.

Re:Make it work fast -

[aquarian]

That's true on paper, but it doesn't always translate to the screen. If you have a good monitor and an OS with good anti-aliasing, fonts like Times read well. Otherwise, newer sans-serif fonts like Verdana, which were specifically designed for screen readability, are much better.

blind people need text

[vanadium]

don't know if anyone has posted this (I'm fairly positive they have but I'm not going to look)

but....

I've been told that if you can view the website comfortably in lynx, web readers for the blind will be able to easily decypher it. Anything that's more info than flash that I'm involved in is completely lynx friendly.

California flunks web crisis response

[fleener]

California's web sites need work. The state is in the middle of a power crunch, issuing a Stage 3 alert Thursday evening (you know, the dire warning before they commence "rolling blackouts"). So, how does a conscientious citizen find out more from its government? Let me count the ways:

1. Visit the state's graphics heavy behemoth of a web site. Clicking on 'Emergency Services' on the front page sends you to earthquake information. Sorry. No electricity warnings easily found.
2. Turn to newspapers to learn that the person in charge of this issue is the 'Independent System Operator.' (And no, the ISO is probably not a computer geek.)
3. Return to the web site and search for the job title. Aha, the first search result takes you to the California ISO web site. Of course the ISO's front page doesn't describe what the ISO does or even explain what 'ISO' stands for.
4. Surely for a stage three alert the ISO would put a big alert message on its front page. Well, you thought wrong.
5. Muddling through its murky interface you find news releases. Ahh, but of course they're all posted as PDF files. The logic must be that only people with PDF readers are energy hogs and they of course enjoy using plug-ins to read plain text documents.

The sad thing is that the average person probably gave up at the state's front page. It's also sad for me because the newspaper reports said only 85% of the state is affected. I wanted to find a map or listing on the web (you know, where people go for more information) to see if I live within that 85% region.

Who wins in all of this? The news media wins by our continued reliance on them. State governments do not understand that they now control their own broadcast medium.

EPA

[ValiantButter]

Take a look at http://www.epa.gov I've heard it runs on Lotus Domino, believe it or not!

My experiences with the FCC and FAA

[pestie]

Okay, I know I'm, like, the billionth person to post a reply, but I'm going to jump in anyway. As a ham radio operator and private pilot, I've had more than my share of dealings with the FAA and FCC web sites. As you might suspect, I have some suggestions.

First and foremost, don't make the layout of the site conform to the organization of the agency itself. For an insider, this is fine - they know what departments/sub-agencies handle what, but for us outsiders, it's a freakin' nightmare.

Both the FAA and FCC have made great strides in improving the usability of their web sites in the last year or two. Check them out.

Try www.hants.gov.uk (nt)

[saintm]

nt

Gov't WebDesign Issues

[madstork2000]

Any good site, (government or not) should identify who their audience is and what their audience is likely to want. By default government sites are going to have to cater to a lower specification so that more users will be able to view the pages.

In my opion that means government sites should be viewable by 640x480 low color computers, and preferably text based browers as well. The text based browser serves to fold first for us geeky users who like lynx, and second for visually impaired visitors who need the pages dictated to them.

The pages should also avoid "bells and whistles" that add little real content. This does not mean that advanced technologies do not have a place, it just means the merits need to be carefully weighed.

For example flash animations could be used for demonstrative purposes to show tthe right way to fill in a form, etc. The point is that technology should be used for a good reason, not merely for the sake of "looking" good. whitehouse.gov in the early years was particularly bad for its tacky use of web design elements.

Moving beyond the basic concepts is the content its self. Government should take the take to develop its documentation to be net-centric. Instead of wasting time printing up thousands of forms and guides and the like, that quickly become outdated, it should create everything in generic markup languages that can easily be spit out in html, pdf, word, plain text, etc.

Given that the above is more or less a pipe dream at this stage, governments should design their sites to be data centric. And provide various means of accessing the information they need to share. By this there pages need to be fully searchable, and preferably using advanced search strings. The content should also be categorized as much as possible (kinda like Yahoo!) so visitors can choose to either search, or "drill-down" to find the content they need. The data should also be x-linked extensively. Crosslinked data is probably the biggest problem I see now. I can usually find a document, but the document is often a small piece of a much larger process. And since I have an incomplete view I go into the office thinking I have everything only to find out I need to fill out 3 other forms and jump through a few more hoops before I can be helped.

Though the most important issue in my mind is knowing your audience and designing to suit their needs. If you have a large audince like a national government would have, then you may need to break down your site and offer differnet versions for different audiences.

Local governments have an easier go of it because they will have a better idea of the demographics of their constituents and will therefore be able to design to an appropriate level. I.e an inner city government where most of teh users are coming from publuic computers in libraries and schools will likely want a different interface than an affluent suburbs city government. I'm sure the rationalizations and implements on geo-political web designs would make an excellent graduate thesis. If anyone has already written one on this topic I'd like to read it. . .

Please remeber these are just my $0.02 Your milage and opinions will certainly vary.

-MS2k

What are the REQUIREMENTS?

[crazyj]

Obviously, most people here are big on usability/acessabiity, and so am I. My question is

"As a government agency what standards are you required to meet with your web site?"

I have heard that all government web site must meet W3C accessability standards.

Although it pains me to say it, if that is true that would mean that, for once, government is setting a good example of what to do.

--
J, Internetist

What a good site needs

[mcrbids]

Concentrate on what the people want and get it to them fast.

A good example of a .gov site I like is fcc.gov. I find whatever I want within a few clicks! Also, search is very important. Excite has a freebie they put out called EWS (Excite for Web Servers) which is both FREE and EXCELLENT at providing search capability thru text files.

Use hit counters everywhere, just hide them if they get in the way of page layout. They provide the information you need to find out what people want. Pages that get hit alot should be made prominent.

Provide a site map! Since every site's navigation is different and this can be confusing, a site map, laid out like a table of contents, is often the best way for a user to get what he/she needs.

Scratch the hideous, boring, and frustrating flash animations, high-frame-count .gifs, etc. FLASHy sites might impress pin-headed bosses and site designers, but as a user, they just get in the way. (See www.usaf.gov - they have now made the "cool intro" optional, but it didn't use to be)

Browser independent

[Drone-X]

Seems like a normal thing to do but sadly enough some government sites disagree (OK, I haven't tried US ones).

Another important aspect is maintenance, as out-of-date government sites really show a lack of respect for their visitors.

Even worse can be the lack of e-mail addresses on the site, there should be an e-mail address to get in touch with the organisation as well as the website maintainer. Of course a real address should also be provided.

CSS

[belg4mit]

Accessability. And how do you do it? With CSS. (Style sheets, http://w3.org/Style/css/) Just don't go overboard. And don't abuse it. Take moviefone.com for example, their site Is completely illegible for me with CSS enabled. Make sure the site looks decent in at least: Netscape 3, Netscape 4, IE4, IE 5, Lynx. And probably: Opera, Netscape 6/Mozilla. But if you've done things right there really shouldn't be any issues. Above all don't get anal about alignment down to the pixel; this usually becomes an issue when you're miusing images... Out side of that, yes. A killer search facility. It's amazing how many large sites there are that focus so much on flash, java, and other mindless drivel, and provide you with no menas of actually getting at what you need.

Re:Best aren't open to the public

[big_cat79]

I have 17,000 users to design for at my small base. We generate close to 250,000 hits a day for our portal page.

Best aren't open to the public

[big_cat79]

I work as a Web developer and designer at navy base outside of washington. i believe our best stuff never makes it out of the internal DoD servers. There are some very talented people working here, with some amazing ideas. It's a shame no one ever gets to see our work. I've been working here 18 months, and my parents, girlfriend, or friends have only been able to see 1 of the approximately 10 sites i've worked on. The one site i've worked on that is open to the public is this recruiting site

Accessibility for government sites

[davep_ub]

NY State has mandated (see its Technology Policy 9903) that all state agency web sites must conform to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Of course, I don't know of any specific sites that have been brought into conformity yet, and NY State hasn't to my knowledge made any extra resources available to do this, but it remains an important goal despite the bureaucrats who hot-potatoed it.

Lots of specifics have been posted by others here. The W3C guidelines are at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ and the state policy is listed at http://www.irm.state.ny.us/policy/99-3.htm.

Please post back after you've come up with a plan, lots of us would be interested.

Dave

More on accessability

[Stultsinator]

A few things that come to mind:

Use intelligent 'alt' tags for images so that it can be understood by blind people

Keep the images that you do use to a minimum

Don't use JavaScript or VB

Use extremely basic HTML

Preview your pages in Lynx

If your boss wants it to be glitzy, code the thing in XML and use XSL to translate it according to the requesting browser's capabilities.

UK Government Guidance on web-design

[Ian@FI]

The UK government set up a group called Information Age Government Champions to deal with this very issue, to standardise their websites and improve interoperability etc etc. Some people over here are saying its just hot-air - but they have at least done some homework before making their recommendations.

They want all government and public sector sites to use XML for interoperability, and they support the use of open standards (although they dont mention open source at this stage).

If you are a UK web-developer then you need to read their recommendations as they are now mandatory for the majority of government and public sector tenders.

Re:Since we're talking about an elected government

[Keith_Beef]

Dead right! Give the punters the impression that their voices are being heard, even if nobody taking the decisions pays any attention...

By asking the right questions in the right way, you can get your punters to justify your policies, whatever they may be. Anybody remember `Yes, Prime Minister'?

good & bad

[John_3000]

The patent office's site, http://www.uspto.gov/ has improved tremendously over the last year and does not presuppose a lot of knowledge about the internal structure of obscure government bureaus. I recommend it, even though its search engine is kind of sucky (way too many stop words). At the opposite end of the scale is the fcc. Their site has stunk for years and still does.

Re:Accessibility issues

[gallir]

Let people decide this with their browsers, and never specify sizes in pixels. It looks awful on small monitors (say, PDAs, or Grandma's 640x480 monitor), and it's awful AND hard to read on a 1600x1200 display. It's true, but every line of a text document shouldn't have more then 85-90 characters (including spaces) for readibility. The recommendation for technical documents is 65-70 chars.

Also, if you want people to read from the screen you should:

• Use sans-serif fonts, for example Verdana or Tahoma. Arial isn't very good.
• Paragraphs must be short, i.e. few lines.
• If you you pretend your documents to be accessible from mobile devices, _don't_ use fixed width tables.
• For the time being, avoid to define font sizes in CSS, it doesn't work in different browsers/platforms. If it's a must, define different CSSs for IE/Netscape and Windows/Linux/Mac. Fonts are smaller in Mac and Linux.
• Don't use backgound images, it adds nothing, but annoyance, to the content.
• Don't use PDF as your main text format, it's very disturbing for reading specific text in laws/regulations/technical specifications.
• sorry... it's getting long, you also must avoid extra large pages as /. pages ;-).

--ricardo

Canada's Gov site is a mess.

[nekros]

Just do a search on Unemployement Insurance and you will see the mess of red tape. I mean, the mess does not allow me to find what i need. I ended up simply using explore's text find and eventually found what i was looking for.

I am a webmaster of commercial sites and a few government funded libraries. I think the best way to think of the site is, even an idiot has to be able to use it. That means a hella good search engine, a site that has quick actions (menu page), a good linked faq and text as well as graphical links.

Nekros

Re:Examples of what to do and what NOT to do

[truelight]

Also check out webbrain.com - that uses the ODP database.

XML and GIS in public data sharing

[robhranac]

This may be a deeper answer than you are looking for, but I believe that government agencies have fallen far short in terms of a greater vision for sharing public data. In particular, government agencies need to jump on the XML bandwagon and begin to develop consistent data format for common types public information, which they should then provide via the web.

I do technical consulting work on public sector planning issues and there is an enormous amount of public data that should be provided through the web, but is not. For example, geographic data representing public infrastructure (roads, transit, etc.) and public records (property lines, housing) are not provided using any sort of consistent framework. Because this data is kept by many agencies across the country at different levels of government (local, state, federal), there is an enormous amount of duplication and waste within agencies themselves. Indeed, there are 1,000 different GIS formats and projections; even when the data is availible digitally, there is no server from which it can be read. The Census Beareau (which has a horrible website) does the best job of data sharing through its nationally availible TIGER GIS files, but no one has even begun to create a distributed framework for sharing and combining geographic data from multiple servers, using a consistent format.

In short, publishing basic HTML pages uses only a tiny fraction of the web's capabilites to improve governments. Is there is any organization that could benifit more from a good data-sharing framework? There is a DARPA-funded project - GeoVRML - at SRI that addresses some of these issues that sprang out of the fledgling digital earth initiative. Clearly, this will require federal initiative, but if you are a government webmaster, this is the type of vision that you should be promoting within your agency.

Phone and Address

[subedei]

One of my biggest annoyances with commercial sites in particular (I haven't had to use too many govt websites beyond the DMV) is that it is nigh impossible to find out a phone number or an address. Some of us want to talk with another human being, maybe out of loneliness or because we cannot word our question well. Sometimes the search engine just doesn't cut it. This information, if not on the first page, should be linked there... and should be clear. Some of the terms corporate sites use to obscure their contact information is amazing. Use terms the layman would use.

What we all really want...

[b0z]

Is the Oval Office InternCam. Hot chicks, fat chicks, kinky chicks. All live and willing to please the "commander in chief." Available through AdultPass for only $19.99 a month. (But please, no whack-a-mole ad windows.)

DON'T make it anything like the FAFSA site...

[vattervi]

Please, whatever you do, don't make your sites like the FAFSA on the Web site.

Everything I go there I can't believe it is a government site. In fact, when I first went there I was very hesitant to type in my information because I was sure I wasn't in the right place. I'm not saying that government sites have to be bland, but I think they should have a certain amount of respectability.

Don't copy this site.

[scott1853]

Not really a gov site, but nylottery.org.

The whole site is flash. Nobody should have to go get the latest version of a plugin to at least view the homepage. Flash should be something that accentuates a page. It should NOT be something that IS the page.

UKONLINE.gov.uk for how not to!

[Garry Anderson]

It is the worse professionally made site ever!

Likely cost of a million pounds - based on fact they are crap at project management.

Navigation and ease of use 0/10

It fits in well with their style of government - with no care for UK citizens.

Iowa state code online; advice from

[ODBOL]

Prof. James Freeman at Cornell College in Mount Vernon Iowa put the Iowa state code online. He argues, convincingly in my opinion, that it's important to provide information as plain old HTML files whenever possible, and minimize dynamic page creation.

For general good advice on Web publishing, I like Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing .

Mike O'Donnell

Accessibility and simplicity

[Sir Polymorph]

Hampshire County Council in the UK is a good example of a site that is designed with access in mind. It has won numerous awards for clear speech and accessibility, including the Royal National Institute for the Blind "See It Right" internet award. It has also been cited by Bill Gates as a good example of the use of internet technology in government.

I am slightly biased, I work there.

PA State web site - www.pa.state.us

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

You can take a look at the Pennsylvania web site http://www.state.pa.us for ideas. Pennsylvania has their web page printed on all vehicle license plates. For this kind of exposure, the web site would have to be appealing and useful for everyone.

Ease of Use

[athlon02]

I've gone to loc.gov sometimes & also things like congress.gov and you think this should be easy enough to drudge through to get the info I want... But I also seem to go through endless links here & there that make it a nightmare... So having some 'obvious' links that are simply state what they lead to & also search engines that are geared for the average American instead of endless links that annoy you to the point of just giving up.

I guess for instance... If I go to some commercial site to download their software, demo or otherwise, I want a link that says 'Download' or 'Get it' and actually leads me to the file with a dozen links in between or that isn't really a download page at all.

Try this site, its UI helps find info fast

[Mabidex]

This is a very informative way to find info the public is looking for... http://www.thebrain.com/ See the "sitebrain" for your site... "Everytime we make predictions we look like complete blasted fools..." Brit Hume (Fox News) Mabidex

Since we're talking about an elected government...

[interactive_civilian]

How about having an opinion poll about a current issure or two on the main page. Perhaps in the way that /. does it so that people feel that they can voice their opinions and the government can perhaps get a feel for what the people seem to think.

Granted, this could be prone to abuse, but I think it would be a step forward in listening to the people that the government is representing,

Other than that, just about everyone else covered the interface and usability requirements quite well, so I have nothing to add there.

out.

Re:Since we're talking about an elected government

[interactive_civilian]

You said:

"By asking the right questions in the right way, you can get your punters to justify your policies, whatever they may be. Anybody remember `Yes, Prime Minister'? "

Which is why you do it along the lines of: have the poll and have a page where people can post comments on it(a la /.).If a poll is unfair, then people will say so. If you have more to say or wish to explain your vote in the poll, you can do so.

Of course, if you want to go into "ultra-conspiracy theory mode" you can always argue that the government can then edit those posts to make them say what they please. But that road leads to futility...

Who knows...perhaps there may actually be some goverment officials that will listen to what the people say...I dunno...probably just wishful thinking, but a young man can hope, ne?

Interdepartment connections

[MissingFrame]

One of the things frustrating to us non-government people is which department is responsible for what. Especially police / fire / courts, etc. Pretend I have a problem and I'm going to your department because it's the only site I could think of. I especially like that I can get state tax forms through links on the federal tax.

Also, has anyone tried to find out local / state / federal laws on most subjects? What a mess that is! It's hard to believe we're supposed to know these things to abide by them.

My Florida

[slutdot]

www.myflorida.com is a site by the state of Florida that places all of their government services under one site to make it easier for the Floridian. While I don't have much of a need for government services right now, I still find it might be pretty convenient to have around should I need services in the future.

Re:My Florida

[dtobias]

However, that site did succumb to the rampant idiocy that compelled its creators to give it a domain name in the com TLD, even though the state of Florida is hardly a commercial institution. The proper address for the official state government site is state.fl.us.

--Dan
My Web Tips page on domain names
--Dan

Re:Thanks, then Redundant Redundancy

[smagruder]

Of course, there's no absolute guarantee, as there will always be hackers. But for the general public who choose to review documents in PDF, they won't know how to (nor will they care to go to the trouble to) tinker with the content. The most a lay person could do is corrupt the file, not deliberately change the content in a meaningful way. But if DOC format is used, for example, anyone could pop the thing into Word and change to their heart's content.

Steve Magruder

Re:Thanks, then Redundant Redundancy

[smagruder]

PDF is great for distributing copyrighted documents where it's important to the author and the posterity of the document itself that nobody will be able to alter the contents before redistributing it.

Steve Magruder

Hit counters should be internal (not seen)

[smagruder]

Assuming that the pages of a site are generated through some kind of server-side engine, "hit counters" should be implemented as database log entries, from which reports can be built. Visual hit counters from the users' POV are useless and annoying.

Steve Magruder

General and specific suggestions

[Preposterous Coward]

General:

• Make the site useful. Ideally I don't just want to passively read information, but to actually do something like apply online for that new business license. Give me tools that will let me avoid picking up the phone or driving down to the office and standing in line all day.
• Make it consistent (and simple). Standardize page layouts, so there's always an easy way to tell where you are, get home, search, etc. Others have mentioned the importance of things like accessibility and printer-friendliness.
• View it from the user's perspective, which is probably either task-based (I want to get a driver's license) or demographic-based (I'm a small business owner, what do I need to know?). Don't organize it based on the internal structure of the government -- I don't want to have to know which department to deal with, I just want to get things done.
• Consider exploiting non-Web interactivity with things like mailing lists. For an employer it might be very useful to be able to, say, sign up for notification by e-mail whenever labor laws change.

And some smaller specific things:

• Put a date on every page, and if information has been superseded, indicate it clearly.
• Provide contact information (e-mail, phone, fax, etc.) for every individual.
• You probably are a good enough Webmaster to know this, but check your logs to see what pages people are actually looking at, what kind of errors they're encountering, what sort of searches they're performing.

Ideally, I'd suggest you do some informal usability testing with real users, i.e. constituents. I'd bet you could find civic organizations whose members would be happy to donate a little time to provide feedback on how they would actually use the site and to critique potential structures.

Re:Here's an idea

[fossa]

HTML, as it was originally designed, is great. It allows the browser a lot of control about where to put and how to format the content (since when did "content" come to mean "flashiness"?). Flash, Java, Javascript, etc (anyhting that doesn't work in a text based browser) are what make most web sites suck.

More bandwidth shouldn't lead to more bloated web sites. It should make browsing faster.

And yes, it is possible to make beatuiful websites that are text browser friendly.

--

Please text-only readable

[nosh]

There should be no need to mention, but ...

Please take care that the site is browseable with
text-only browsers. Blind people, people with an
slow conection will thank.

Ok, here's the crap WE have to go through.

[Rafajafar]

All this talk is great, but not going to happen within any reasonable length of time. For example, recently there was a law past that says that not only sites that are owned but also sites that are partly FUNDED by ANY government institution MUST comply in every way to the disabled. This decision was passed overnight, and effected hundreds of businesses and government sites. Over here at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility www.jlab.org, due to the fact we are funded by the DOE, we were suddenly attacked by the lawyers for the lab for not being able to comply with the vision-impaired web browsers with our current workload and resources. See, for a long time, the only resources available to gov't sites was Pico and a UNIX server. This means no SSI, no C progs, no database, and limited Perl use. Only recently were we allowed to start develop web apps (using ColdFusion and IIS, ironically) and start placing our site into database. Now, every other site in the world can adapt to change very quickly; changing one or two files to alter the design of the site. Govn't facilities cannot do this because of moronic regulations that are ineffective and hampering to the web staff. Another problem, which I am led to believe is a reoccurring theme across gov't sites, is that our web teams are understaffed, under-appreciated, and undersupplied. If it weren't for the fact that 95% of the development here at JLab came from student interns who are working for peanuts, there would never be any progress. And the support of the local community just isn't behind us. They use us to post information and do the dirty work but are slow to act when we need more help. With this kind of crud going on, there is no way in the world that a pre-existing gov't site could possibly conform to the standards set by Congress. The governments goal is not to make a decent web site, it is to serve the people through archaic paper-shuffling and 1on1 "assistance". It is yet to realize the full potential the web has to offer, although Gore and his team did an excellent job this past four years to get .GOV going strong. There is much work to be done on government sites, but alas, there is no real push to get the work completed. HOPEFULLY, they will turn a "blind eye" to the Americans with Disabilities Act clause that effects gov't sites. If not, I'd rather look for a new internship than edit 8000+ HTML pages to add ALT tags.

Re:Ok, here's the crap WE have to go through.

[dtobias]

That's "ALT attributes", not "tags", and if you had done your Web development job right in the first place you would have been using them correctly all along (they've been part of the IMG tag since it was invented, and the HTML standards have always encouraged their use to allow accessibility).
--Dan
Dan's Web Tips: Images
--Dan

Re:Anything would be fine be

[limejuice]

Informative my ass! I suppose any post that bashes Microsoft or Bill Gates, no matter how blatantly lame in its wording, automatically gets moderated up. This is just another piece of evidence that /. is becoming increasingly more retarded every day. This site will be completely unreadable in short timing. It won't be long before you see nothing but all the fucking lame ass fp, goatsec.kz, and hotgrits bullshit. I would love to raise my threshold, but time and time again I see rather informative posts get scores of 0 or even -1. I'm eventually going to get sick of it all and stop visiting this site, and I'm sure many others will, as well.

oh, and microsoft suckses and i think bill gates should be gang raped by an eternal line of diseased prisoners!!!

you may now mod me +5 insightful
--

Security thru intimidation !

[whoppo]

If you put lots of explosions, flames, and glowing, rotating skulls on your page, the cute little H4X0R kiddies will phear and respect you and leave you alone cuz they'll think you're "l33t".. If that's not an option, clear information in a sanely organized layout often makes for a useful website.. no flash, low bandwidth images (if any at all), little or no java to save us linux/netscape users from aggrivation and keep the content current. Simple, but effective.

Here's a good example...

[AFCArchvile]

The US Postal Service website.

Sure, that's not exactly a government website, but I think that all the government websites should have a similar layout (minus the advertisements, of course). Also, consider a MUCH better setup than what exists in some gov sites (IIS4, or even worse, IIS on NT 3.51! Oh My!).

Re:Anything would be fine be

[CrayzyJ]

Not that I am advocating using IIS, but the studies I have seen show IIS serving content faster than any other USER Level Web server.

Consider using a kernel level web server or a kernel level web server accelerator.

My 1/50 of a dollar.

Considerations for the blind: STRONG versus B

[Vociferous Troll]

Government Web sites (well, any Web sites for that matter) should be designed with handicapped persons in mind. One of the easiest things you can do to make a Web page friendly for the visually impaired is to understand the difference between the <B> and <STRONG> tags, and use them accordingly. Unfortunately, it seems like very few people do.

If you wish to indicate that text within a paragraph is to stand out logically (i.e., that you would vocally stress it when reading it aloud), use the <STRONG> tag. If you simply wish to make some text boldface to make it stand out visually (i.e., the column headings in a table) use <B>.

Now, you might wonder what the difference is. The difference is that many (if not most) of the text-to-speech translation systems used by visually impaired surfers treats these tags differently. You want logically-important parts of your text to be emphasized when "spoken." You do not want the same column headings.

While it might be a bit of extra work, and while it might not make one bit of visual difference, using the correct tags makes your page more friendly to blind surfers. It doesn't take that much effort to use the proper tags.

--

Government sites

[Yabada]

Might I suggest checking out the Tasmanian Government Internet Publishing Standards (TGIPS) at Go.Tas (they are a little out-of-date but still contain good stuff, and also ServiceTasmania which IMHO is a very well designed site, give the search a go its quite cleverly designed. For some clever technical ideas try TheLIST a land info site and enACT a collation of Tas. legislation - in all the web research I've done I find this the easiest legislation site to find what you want quickly (if for some obscure reason you might be looking for Tas. legislation). For an example of terrible government site design go to here. There are unfortunately many other examples I could list. Anyhow hope that helps a bit.

Here's an idea

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Why don't we just chuck HTML all together and just have .txt pages? People can copy and paste URLs into the browser.

</SARCASM>
----------

XML GOV DTD?

[BroadbandBradley]

wouldn't it be nice if we could all come up with a way to define all the data we want out of the government in an XML document table definition (or whatever dtd stands for) then the site could be scaled and made available to everything from WAP browsers all the way up to 1.5Ghz monster with sounds/animations and such.

Even better, custom XML-GOV aware 'Clients' could be developed on top of Mozilla as just some chrome that's stored locally to create a Govzilla application/skin that would be extremely efficient in being able to send and recieve just the data, and apply all the flash/nonflashy stuff from the client side. XML is easilly parsed such that XML-GOV functiontions could even be added to chat applications like Gabber

Like how about this XML-GOV applet: have a site map in a Pull-down menu at the top of the browser, so you could go 2-6 pages deep with one click

Also, give us accounts so you can know what we want. if I'm a penguin, I might want to see the obscure story about Linux being used at the local DMV to speed things up. And offer web-based email or 'personal message box' functions, such that if I request a message or response in email, I don't need to rely on my ISP's crappy email service at home

Re:Usefulness is important

[br0ck]

The site www.firstgov.gov provides a central location for finding information from almost all U.S. local, state or federal sites. I have found it to be a well organized and useful site and I have generally been able to find answers, forms or sites that I seek with minimal effort.

In fact, I used it to find a link to the New Jersey Rail Schedules.

Re:My thoughts

[boboroshi]

It sounds hokey, but it's dead on for government sites, take Jakob Nielsen to heart with a lot of his key points. Also, make sure that the content is in a logical location and makes sense for the user to find it. If you can, hold beta test rounds with users who have never seen the site before, and video tape them. Get issues. Fix them.
// john athayde
# x@boboroshi.com
# http://www.boboroshi.com/

Two Words: User Centered

[cube farmer]

Before you start, determine your purpose and your audience: what do you want to communicate, and with whom?

Some suggestions:

• First, meet with management to determine what they want to communicate, and with whom they believe they will be communicating. (if they don't want to meet with you, run like hell and find a different project).
• Next, meet with a group of customers. You don't mention whether you're designing for a local government agency, something statewide, something federal, a UN agency, a provincial government not in the US, or whatever; but your customer is the person who either receives services from your agency or is required to pay your agency directly, whether your agency renders services or not. Meet one-on-one and with small groups of your customers to discover what they expect from your agency, and by extension, your agency's website. Take lots of notes.
• Evaluate how managements' and customers' views differ and complement one another. Write a project scope that accounts for these, including detailed explanations for features and design elements that management has not requested. be sure to include reasonable estimates of the time and cost involved in developing the project within the scope you have envisioned.
• Receive written management approval for your project scope and budget before proceeding.

Don't start coding yet:

• Draw a document hierarchy for your site. This can be done with pencil and paper, with Visio, whatever. But establish the relationships among the areas of the website before you make coding decisions.
• Sketch or mockup with a graphics tool the general look of your home page, index pages, content pages, form pages, etc.
• Receive written management approval for your hierarchy and visual design before proceeding.

Now it's time to choose your platform.

• Choose your platform wisely. Whether the site's going to be built from static HTML, upon an open source platform like Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL, with a commercial product like NT, IIS, ASP, and SQL7, or in some combination, be sure your choice will meet the established scope and objectives -- and stay within budget.
• Don't choose a product because "that's what Department CYA is using." Every project is different.

Think you're ready to write some code? Not yet:

• Read Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen. Feel free to disagree with some of his conclusions.
• Read Web by Design: The Complete Guide by Molly Holzschlag. Feel free to disagree with some of her conclusions.

Okay. Now you can write code:

• Write vendor-neutral, standards-compliant HTML.
• Separate presentation from content.
• Follow the rules you've learned from Molly and Jakob.

Good Luck!

Heeeaaayyy GUYS!!!

[GeneralEmergency]

"...a site that is trying to present regulatory requirements (to an audience that would really rather be doing something else)..."

Wait a minute here guys. For all we know Wally Hartshorn could be part of a new secret INTERNET regulatory agency. DONT HELP! DONT HELP! DONT HELP!

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...

This has been a test of the Paranoia Broadcast System. This has only been a test.

"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --

Some thoughts

[johann909]

accessibility is a good idea, since i have heard things about agencies getting sued for not being ADA compliant. As far as content goes, I would advise you to look into XML/XSLT for seperating your content and presentation. You can effectively build an information architecture using XML, and you can style it with XSLT. This is useful if you have multiple views of your data (snazzy dhtml/html based, Handheld based, PDF, ADA compliant [i.e. no frames with an shitload of alt tags]). As far as layout and design goes, i suggest you consult works by Jacob Niesen. He is a little overated (and overpaid) in my opinion, but he has decent ideas now and again. Good luck

Usability

[jbrooks]

The funny sort of paradox about web design is that you truly don't have any design influence as a designer.

Before you even lay cursor to virtual canvass, you should be talking to your users, representative audiences and cover the spectrum of users (newbie vs savvy)

Ask what the icons you're going to use mean to them, does the globe mean global or networking. What does site map mean to them? What would you expect to find behind this word? It's their preconcieved notions that will make the site a success, not yours. Unfortunately, whenever asked about web site design, everyone turns into a critic, so you get a chance to flex your social engineering skills. (give them a task to complete, it keeps them busy trying to be "right", but you should be keeping an eye on the cursor -- where did it first go when you told them to find x)

I have found that user testing before any design/look and feel is implemented makes the whole process cleaner and less painful, no redesign on the fly, no massive usability issue cropping up at the last minute, and , this is the big bonus, when your meathead non computer user boss suggests a big animated chicken graphic, you have stats and math to back up why that would be a bad idea, it's not just opinion against opinion.

Alot of people have commented about search capabilites, and I think that's a great idea, it's one of the first things that users go for, but, and this is a big but, it'll be the only time they ever use it if they don't find what they want. Which means that right from the beginning, you have to have an intelligent nomenclature system in place for pages and documents. Too many people just get sloppy about providing useful names and alt tags. Unfortunately, the search engine doesn't get sloppy, it returns exactly what's there.

Those are the most important things, IMO about web design, if you give cause to them, you'll find that your website will begin to develop itself, in the right direction, on time, and mistake free. Don't forget that it's an evolving process as well, do it in rounds, as you go along, if you're not sure of something, user test it. All it takes is 5 users (1 user will discover 31% of all usability issues). You will have covered your own ass, made a website that works for the users, and it will have a "feel" to it that other sites don't have. It's like carpentry, just put some love into the work

Ha, I just previewed, can you tell I do this for a living?

---------------

Re: Fonts

[Interrobang]

Have to disagree with you on the fonts issue. You must be from the "old school" of tech writing; I'm from the new. Sans-serif fonts are actually harder to read (less flow between the letters), especially for people with print-processing problems (and astigmatisms). Also, sans-serif fonts are just ugly to boot...I don't know about you, but I hate looking at kilometres and hectares of Arial.

And definitely stay away from oodles of columns or really huge tables. Again, these are very tiring to read, particularly for people who are inclined to metathesize letters/columns/rows.

Also, when designing Weeb Sights, take into consideration that sizeable minorities of your website readers will be

1) Non-native English speakers
2) Colour-blind
3) Visually impaired somehow
4) Dyslexic, and
5) Some or all of the above.

Some of the best sites I know of aren't even especially pretty--but they get the job done.

Interrobang

Government websites.

[Irvu]

Allthough the search is somewhat confusing I've always found www.congress.gov to be indespensible for obtaining useful information in a minimum of time. On the opposite end of the spectrum I've always been annoyed with www.whitehouse.gov because it has more flash than function. Irvu.

dont do a site

[streetermurdock]

that is full of warnings about it being government property and all the fun things that will happen to you if you violate their trust, we are all fully aware of most of said items


-:-:-:-:-:-
my gay ass life

.gov review

[Art_XIV]

www.irs.ustreas.gov - Nicely done. Simple yet amusing design. I never knew paying taxes could be so fun(?) And all those downloadable forms and publication! I love downloading free documentation, even if it is for tax publications. Too bad I always feel like I'm somehow being monitored at this site...

www.navy.mil - Another nice one. Effective use of HTML, w/o alot of distracting crap.

www.state.pa.us - ??? Am I supposed to be buying something, here? Nice use of CSS, though.

www.jpl.nasa.gov - Not a whole lot of substance, but nice-looking and easy to navigate.

Simpler tends to be better. And more accessible! Check out w3c's guidelines for tips on accesibility for people with disabilities.

Washington State

[TechnoWeenie]

As a user and not a website designer I have found Washington State's website at http://access.wa.gov to be very useful. They have a several ways of finding what you want with information broken down by your choice of Subject or Agency or Fed./State/Local. The front page seems clean and well organized.

Tips from the webmaster at HUD

[megaduck]

Check out the HUD Sacramento website. According to their webmaster (my father), they had several design requirements.

1) They had to post all of the information made available by the Freedom of Information Act and make it easily accessible.

2) The site needed to be usable by the general public from streetside web terminals, public libraries, etc...

3) All of the sites, regional and national, had to have the same "look and feel".

IMHO, they did a pretty good job. The site's pretty easy to navigate, it's fast loading, and it holds an ASTOUNDING amount of information. If you've got any questions about the design of the site, feel free to e-mail the webmaster.

Every document should be available in digital form

[lowflying]

If a document is published from a government entity, it should be available in some sort of downloadable format, before it ever goes to the printer. This is especially true for documents in high enough demand that they are for sale through the GPO.

Dave

Re:Anything would be fine _but_

[jsse]

Sorry I were a bit carried away thus lacking of details.

I could not tell you which government, but bare with me due to the sensitivity of my position.

I just gave you a luser story about one of our information website, which run on IIS4.

In feb this year, a hacker defaced it. Report had shown that they took 5 hours to restore the website. Woo quick, but I guess it's just the time they took to restore exactly same crap. How do I know, because the website was hacked again next day.

Did they do anything after the second hack? They did, they called Microsoft for help. The MS representative in suit install the latest patch in the NT server as a fix. Yeah like patch should solve all the problems! Come on, shouldn't you need to find out what had happned before fixing it? (remind me my mom fix the TV by hitting it, she can be a MS representative.)

Guess what, third hack. This time they took it down immediately, not even let the press realize it. The site was taken down, move elsewhere, IP cancelled.

Even after this embarrassing instance, they still insist on using MSIIS. OOOOk, next patch will fix everything.

About the Flash thing, they do a lot of flashes animations at the front page. It's good to look at - at the first time, but the second time, the third time....They don't care how long it takes a citizen to load the freaking front page, they just want it look good.

Overloading? So you don't believe IIS would down after certain amount of load? I believe many of the surfers here saw this before:

Microsoft ODBC failure...blah blah

Next time feed above message to Google will hit our website. ^_^

If only I could tell you our government's website, and have you slashdot it. It will then crash even before the first troll post his first post.

Re:Anything would be fine be

[jsse]

Given high memory, cache and processing power, the IIS can crash in the speed of light.

Anything would be fine be

[jsse]

Don't use Microsoft IIS server FOR GOD'S SAKE.

It's EXTREMELY SLOW, crash at high load, and yet still want to play tones of Flash which bored readers.

Our government's(non-us) website has been hacked over and over again. Get a clue.

Re:Anything would be fine be

[e2d2]

If Im not mistaken this is made of corn, or as the Native Americans called it..maize. Can you back any of these accusations up with fact or is this all just the typical rhetoric? Some US websites do run Apache on *nix machines and they have been hacked (read:whitehouse.gov).

"and yet still want to play tones of Flash which bored readers"
what?

Thank God I do not need to admin this crap

[jsse]

^_^

I wonder if you'd ever read this...anyway

[jsse]

I wish you could read my reply sometime.

To be honest I really wish Microsoft Windows running more stable and robust. I liked Windows, I write programs and play games with it when I was a teen. However, its marketing strategy and exponential number of bugs forced me to look for alternatives.

It's little problem in crashing for home use, but I just could not bet my career on something that could not take load and crash too often. You may say it may not be the NT to be blamed. For instance, a fax server generated 1000+ error popup that crashed my NT server. Which is to be blamed? The fax server? Yes, it's buggy, but the NT shouldn't let an app crash itself.

It's especially annoying to have been forced to use NT by management who ignore our advise but only trust sales. Knowing that your career would be at risk, is there something more annoyning than that? I know i'm not the only one experience it, and gradually people growing with a hatre toward Microsoft(of course we hate our boss already)

My story just telling two things 1) Crash and hacked are inevitable, but the attitudes of those management and Microsoft's representatives make our life very difficult. 2) Microsoft should have been dealing with bugs and exploits more seriously. Their premium service level is up to installation of patches. Really. That's very frustrating. I can understand that, due to the closeness of the source, very few people in microsoft could debug the underlying bugs that might occur.

Imagine, would you continue to support a brand of car from a commpany putting safety at lesser priority but only focusing on making good sales? I wouldn't risk my life with it. Bad software wouldn't kill us, but would kill our career.

Anyway, I'm not writing to gain karma, I'm honored to have been marked informative, but all I want is to share my opinion with wises like you.

However, in my view, it's wrong to judge /. has any intention to attack a particular verndor simply because they mod up a certain kind of comments. I do believe the mod is very objective. When I filter out comments with low score I got very good articles to read from the rest. Isn't it great?

My apology for my weak English and tedious reply

Vincent Flanders

[spood]

Try to avoid doing the kinds of things that are displayed at Web Pages That Suck. Vincent Flanders may be a crusty old man, but sometimes the best way to do something right is to know how it's done wrong first.

Re:Make them printer-friendly

[koivi]

I too have helped with state agency web sites, and I agree with the printer-friendly point all the way. There is one other major concern that I have dealt with for the state: Browsers. Everyone wants their sites to run on all browsers, but when I tell them how to be 100%, the just cringe. Nobody wants to own a black & white (or whatever colors your browser uses) all text site anymore.

There are many solutions to this, but the one I like the most is running parallel sites. Now before you flame me about development costs, etc, hear me out. I don't mean have 10 different versions that are displayed according to browser. I mean have a text-only option that doesn't use tables and has few (if any) images. This takes care of the printer-friendly and browsers like lynx (because people who have them do use them when they want something specific and don't want to wait for images). Then use ONE other version that has all the images, tables, java, and all that other nice stuff.

Once you have solved how you want to design, you will need to implement it in a way that your information is easily accessible. You don't want to send someone on a 30 click trip when they don't want to be there in the first place (but have to) . Arrange menu systems that will allow the user to see exactly which path to take. Never use graphics as the only point of navigation because colors may render in such a way that the image is unreadable, or worse yet, the type may be too small for the user to read (trust me, it doesn't matter how big the type is, someone always wants it bigger)!

Oh gee, you're not done yet! You need to decide (the decision may have been made for you already) how you want your information. Do you want to use plain text files, html, pdf, ps, etc., or maybe all the above?

At any rate, these are just a few suggestions that I follow when designing govt sites because of my previous experience.

koivi

taxes for flash

[E.DiMasi]

The perfect example of tax money being spent on flash is at the Internal Revenue Service! Have a look -- and time yourself -- how long does it take you to find the form you need to request a tax ID number for your new business?

My pet peeves match everyone else's: pages that don't print well; dead-end pages with no links back to command central; long drop-down fold-out menus that fill your screen because the common selection (like, "United States") at the end of the alphabetized list; and unnecessary message boxes that appear when you hold the mouse over a link and obscure the text underneath. An example of a site making this last mistake is the American Physical Society.

Actually though, scientific facilities and publishers aren't bad sites to visit. They look nice but aren't too commercial, and they do want to get real content across.

Themes.org

[suwain_2]

I am really happy with themes.org - the layout is *excellent*. Particularly cool is the ability to choose a site theme - they will occasionally redesign the site, but users can choose from any existing layouts if they want. This does, however, require that they keep cookies, and I'm sure a lot of people will have issues with the government and cookies...

All this said, I can't quite see how themes.org and the government are at all related - themes.org is essentially a super-cool database (plus forums and such). I cannot imagine going to irs.gov and clicking on "New Tax Rate: +10%". Nor can I imagine people uploading pictures of their taxes... But stop by themes.org, if you never have, and play around with it for a while. I liked it, then I registered. Now I *love* it.

Re:Search!

[suwain_2]

Search capability is often overlooked, or, perhaps, something people conciously omit. A search engine can require a really good webserver. However, a site without a search engine is, as far as I'm concerned, something that the nephew of the site owner threw together while playing with FrontPage for the first time.

A site with a few pages can get away with it, but any government site should really have search capability.

Re:Make them printer-friendly

[travis77]

I have to agree with this. However, you can do many powerfull things with a govenment website. Here in good ol' Las Vegas our glorious Clark County web site allows you to find information by department, and it lets you search databases like marrige licences (did you really get married in that drunken binge) or look up county assessors information. The price to pay is they are complex and not friendly to the slower or smaller screened computer out there. some URL's http://www.co.clark.nv.us http://www.co.clark.nv.us/recorder/mar_srch.htm http://mapsrv.co.clark.nv.us/

Forest Research Site

[randydm]

Hi Folks, Just wanted to submit another URL of a government site for your comments: http://www.srs.fs.fed.us/ It is designed to inform the public about USDA Forest Service Research in the Southeastern US. I am sure that there is Forest Research in not a hot topic for most peple but hopefully it is easy to use. Please let me know what you think or use our on-line comment card. --rdm

Re:Please! No Flash!

[webzombie]

I agree!

I'm so sick of the over designed one minute info-mercials that some sites feel compelled to slap their visitors in the face with.

Putting Flash on the frontend of a web site would be like getting your new car delivered by tow truck and having to return to the dealer to get the keys. Think about it!

WebZombie

Re:Search!

[Whatever Fits]

Yes, a site must have the information about putting extra lights on my truck, but please don't put just the regulations online. Put up something that we can actually read! I am a computer programmer, not a lawyer.

Any time there is something in the news regarding your agency, put up a link with the appropriate phone numbers, addresses, etc. right off the front page (or on a News page).

Accessible Government Websites

[GlobalChangeGeek]

Ok. I get frustrated by those sites designed to be a fixed width. They end up squished up in the upper left hand corner of my browser. I run a number of government-related WWW sites (on Linux boxes of course!) and would appreciated (constructive) feedback.

What do you think of globalchange.gov?

GlobalChangeGeek

Hire a Designer!

[Jack-In Simstim]

No offense but techies tend to make the worst kinds of design, and design by council always sucks, look at the new US Currency. For Govt. sites I think things should be simple clean and straight forward. I like the IRS site for being entertaining but finding info can be a bitch and it is often poorly kept I think taking a cue from commercial sites is a good idea. You want to make a user want to be there even if the info presented is dull.

this is what a government website should be

[sgarrity]

Imagine a website where you could:

• find out the current ski conditions
• find any business in your province
• see all properties up for sale on a map
• contact anyone in your government
• download the provincial budget (and the previous three years of budgets)
• find anything and everything you could possibly want to know about the election including live results
• easily find every single accommodation, campground, festival or event, restaurant, or tour in the province
• find useful and up-to-date weather info including a chart of the temperature over the last 24-hours
• watch the Province House live
• view every single Provincial Statute
• see where everything in your province is on a map

Then imagine that it's all easy to find and navigate, quick to load, and resists the temptation of self-indulgent multimedia.

If you are lucky enough to live on Prince Edward Island then you already have a website like this: www.gov.pe.ca with "website architecture and construction by Reinvented Inc. for the Government of Prince Edward Island, Canada". It is insanely great.

(this post an excerpt from actsofvolition.com )

Government Web Sites

[jnall]

We recently launched a new site to assist government Web developers...you might find it useful. http://usability.gov

Outsource

[Tony Shepps]

Find sites that have similar needs to your own, find out who did them, and hirm them to do yours.

I say this as such a service firm. But I think it's true. The problem that you're probably going to face is an information architecture problem. Designing a good AI is as difficult as designing a good UI.

Also, a good web firm will be able to look at the problem from a different angle than the ways you're looking at it, because they'll be approaching it from an outsider's POV... exactly the POV you need.
--

Re:Thanks, then Redundant Redundancy

[Paul Crowley]

PDF cannot guarantee this. No format can.
--

Yes.

[pb]

The biggest problem with government websites is government. My personal example is the FCC.

They obviously don't understand the web or the Internet, and probably never will. Frightening, eh?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Re:Got it in One

[Masem]

User defaults are your friend; style sheets are your enemy.

Ahhhhhh, not quite. Style Sheets are friends too, just don't abuse them. Importantly, do NOT declare any classes as "!important" such that they override any users setting. But as you also say, never ever never ever touch the font size setting, and always use font families as opposed to specific typefaces. But if you are using CSS for maximum readability, the only major things that you are probably playing with is spacing and indentation.

Re:My ideas

[ragnar]

As a citizen of Washington, I take offense to these statements, but this is a typical type of response unfortunately. If you think denying 600,000 people who live and work in DC representation, then I am saddened. This is a very unique city, and it bears many costs so that people from all over the world can come, visit and litter the landscape.

I have met tons of people who wise crack about DC, but once they spend a little time here they realize it is a fine city. When they find out that we are taxed without representation in congress, they are usually amazed. What? Don't we live in America?

Make it work fast -

[gelfling]

No glitzy graphics, no dancing woodchucks and no 24 bit color pictures of the natural wonders of your state, region or the agency heads of your organization. Assume that if someone is going to a government site it's to get in, get some information fast and get out again. For us who don't have transwarp petabit links to the net all the fancy graphics are a frustrating waste of time. You need a naviagator on the first page a website table of contents and a working search button all on the first page. Do not have endless pages that just point to lower level pages. Have a no frames option. Do not embed sound anywhere. Put a contact for every organization and person on every page where they are referenced. Make everything printable. Eliminate counters. Do not use any java anywhere. Do rely on cookies for anything. No funky colors no colorblindness strange contrasting colors. Sans serif fonts only.

And when your done making it simple, test it out and make it more simple.

Re:Make it work fast -

[jandrese]

Sans serif fonts only

Why? The entire purpose of serif fonts is to make them easier to read by drawing your eye down the line. Personally, I'd much prefer if people left the FONT tag alone. I chose the fonts that were easy for me to read, don't presume I find 6 point Arial easier on the eyes, even if you do. Actually, it got so bad there for awhile that I even clicked on the "override document fonts" checkbox, even though that tends to break those pages that are assume you're browsing with IE at 800x600 under Windows.

Re:Examples of what to do and what NOT to do

[waldoj]

Along these lines, a Open Directory Project-type layout would be helpful on any large (City or larger, if I had to pick a line) government site.

-Waldo

Examples of what to do and what NOT to do

[Servo]

Florida's Sunbiz site is a good example of how not to do it. I have a heck of a time searching for information.

Some things that I like in a site... organize data so that you can find information no more than 2 or 3 categories deep. (2 preferred) Also, make a navigation bar that lets you get back to the different parts of the site, without having to back track. Sun Microsystems isn't a government site, but has lots of information that is fairly well organized in the manner I mentioned above.

information should be accessable

[Abstract]

First and formost, information should be very accessable. Keep the user in mind. Why will the visit the site? What kind of information is requested? It's just the basic web design stuff.

Organize in a hierarchy!

[zCyl]

Government web sites should be there for two purposes. One, to provide information, and two, to provide service. The main hinderence to this is that sites are not designed so that information and services can be found. So many sites make grand assumptions about what the user is looking for, and try to lead the user on a grand goose chase around a mess of hyperlinks leading nowhere but in circles. Simply present a simple main page (with FEW graphics!) containing subcategories which a person can identify with what they're looking for. Then, in the pages referred to in these subcategories, do the same, and eventually list the appropriate services and information. There is no money to be made, and thus no need to "promote" or "advertise" a particular government service. Simply provide the information and services in a well-ordered manner.

Re:Accessibility issues

[sammy baby]

This is a government web site, not a sales site. The goal is complete and accurate information, not loading speed.

You had me until right about here. Load speed is a useability issue, not an asthetic issue, so government web site should be very much concerned with load speed. Besides which, most experts agree that large amounts of continuous text are difficult to read continuously, especially when scanning for specific pieces of information, and especially when viewed on a computer screen.

In situations like this, I think (personal opinion) that it's best to offer a "downloadable, monolithic" version of a document for printing, as well as a sectioned version for online viewing. I'm not going to get involved in an argument as to what the file type should be for a downloadable version, though.

You're wrong about serifs and readability. Sans-serif is easier to read when the words are unfamiliar (proper nouns, technical jargon, etc.). Serifed fonts are easier to read for normal text, so long as the reader understands the words that are being used.

Eh, whatever. Almighty Nielsen would disagree with you where screen fonts are concerned, but frankly I think that the enemy of the good for onscreen body font selection is the unconventional. The difference between serif fonts and sans serif fonts is minor enough for most that it's not really worth worrying about. Unless you pick some fsck'ed up font that the viewer doesn't have, or can't render properly. Or unless it's just plain ugly.

Don't endorse any specific commercial vendor

[Sloppy]

Government websites should not favor any commercial entity, even ones that already have large marketshares and are perceived by most of the public to be defacto standards. That means you really should stick to open standards, even moreso than a privately-owned web site does.

When a privately-owned web site decides to make a web site that, instead of just using straight HTML, only works with MSIE and Netscape, it is regrettable, but it is their right. And some people think it's not even significantly regrettable, as long as more than 90% of population happens to currently use one of those products.

But not so with a taxpayer-funded web site. I don't want my tax money being used as corporate welfare (in the form of free marketing tie-ins) for Microsoft, Netscape, Macromedia, etc. If the government makes a web site that uses vendor-specific HTML extensions, Flash animations, etc, the government is creating addition market pressure to get users to use those specific vendors' products. Not good at all, IMHO.

And although this may sound extreme at first, that probably also applies to Unisys too. (i.e. If you use GIFs, then users of the web site are be required (even if very indirectly) to do business with one single specific vendor: the LZW patent holder.) So even if Slashdot's people decide to continue to support the LZW patent holder by using GIFs, government web sites should not.

---

Re:Accessibility issues

[redhog]

* never specify Arial, at its own, and especially not together with a size of 0 or -1, since on all systems but Windows, Arial does not exist, and the default font, in size 0 or -1 is just unreadable. This holds true for both MAC and UNICes. Instaed, specify "Arial,Helvetica,Geneva"

* Do not clutter the page with a lot of small boxes, frams and icons.

* Remember that the information as such, not the design, is the most important. Nice graphics pretty, but most of the time just annoying...

*If you have several levels of "directories" of information, try to make each level look more or less the same, that is, don't have the first level be a traditional menu to the left, the next one a horizontal list at the top of the page, and the third one a bullet-list in the middle of the page. What I'm trying to say is that similarity between all the pages in where different parts of them are to be found, is good.

Re:Please! No Flash!

[matth]

Indeed you are very correct,and if we look at this website.. we see that it is infact done in HTML as well! http://www.anthrax.osd.mil/HTML_interface/default. html and looks just as good =) granted they don't know what they are doing with graphics.. since I"m running here at 800x600 and the right frame is in scroll bars... but...

Timeliness of info would be nice

[dmorin]

I think one thing people fear on hitting a government site is that the information they need once in a blue moon will be buried someplace they can't get at it. A great example is just before the recent election, I wanted to contact my city office to make sure I was registered and find my voting location. Couldn't find it for the life of me. Found several sites claiming to be the official city of quincy web site. Know how I solved the problem? Called the "main number" (which I got off the web site) and asked. It would have been nice if the month or so before the election they had right on the home page a link saying "Looking for information on voting/registering?"

Other ideas for timely government information include tax information around the beginning of the year, college/saving tips around September (Massachusetts has the U-fund, for example, that I'm sure people want to know about).

Localized info would be great, too. If I could go to a web site periodically and find out things like what road construction they're doing in my town, where they're putting new streetlights, things like that, I'd probably visit more frequently. But I won't necessarily go looking for it, ya know?

d

Minimize!

[scotpurl]

Minimize graphics, propoganda, self-congratulatory nonsense, and non-content. You're government, not a business. Follow the metaphor of online newspapers where there is minimal glitz, and copious content.

Skip flashy, flashing, animated anything. No graphics as text. No sound files. No streaming anything (unless it's content, and not some speech by a politician about how he's improving lives). Make URL's memorable like my.gov/taxes or my.gov/forms. People can remember URLs the same way they can rememember 10-digit phone numbers. Use directories with default documents rather than obtusely named documents. compare my.gov/taxes/2000 vs. my.gov/taxes/2000-forms-list.cfm. Which can you remember?

If you want to hire someone for help, hire someone who's specialty is useability, and not web design (they tend to be mutually exclusive groups). That'll make it available to the handicapped (federal mandate on that, you know, but rarely enforced), consume less bandwidth, and the average employee can create a web page from a template. Discourage forms/files in .doc format, as that makes it easy to embarass yourself with a Word virus. PDF or plain HTML (which you can save all Word documents as) suffices.

Most of all, list EVERYONE's email addresses. The big boss types may not like having their email addresses listed, but heck, the Prez and Vice-Prez have theirs listed, as does every member of congress. Also, have a generic email address as a catch-all for those who don't know who to contact. Make that account auto-reply immediately (so they know you got it), then have someone who's job it is to either reply or forward, those emails, within one day of receipt.

A Working Search Engine

[scotpurl]

A search engine that searches your site, and actually works. Place a link to it at the top of _every_ page, and again at the bottom.

Why? Because it allows them to bypass navigation. They also may not know what the heck it's called, or when it was, or all of your content may not be reachable by navigation. (As in, broken links.)

Canadian way of doing things...

[Hadean]

I work for a design firm here in Ottawa, Ontario Canada and all of the government (.gc.ca) sites are moving to a singular way of working - dubbed The Common Look and Feel. I'm personally quite happy with it, and not because it's stupidly easy for me to design a department's website using pre-made templates, but because it actually has some sense in it. The Canadian government is (unfortunately) spending untold millions of dollars on changing the sites over to a more accessible format - which is a good thing (of course, the old sites were good enough - why not spend those millions on something a little more useful? Emergency housing in Ottawa has up to a 7 year waiting list, but the department is spending over 500,000 on redesigning their website - excuse me? ... er, off topic a bit there...)

Anyways, basically, we're moving to the most accessible sites possible, but still keeping design/looks-and-feel an important part of it... It'll fit in a 640x480 screen with 256 colours, but it'll at least look nice - that's the plan...

(hmm, I want target="_blank" abilities in Slashdot... that'd be nice... ;-p )

Re:Canadian way of doing things...

[Hadean]

Although you already replied to yourself, I feel I should still write some responses...

For example, page layout is specced out down to the exact pixel. We all know that this is bad, and I'm sure PDA users with 140x140 screens will be happy to know that content is NOT ALLOWED TO EXIST IN THE LEFT 150 PIXELS.

Same goes with any other net-enabled thing, like cell phones.... But the it comes down to one thing: do you want to build x-many sites to accomodate every single thing out there or should you at least go for what's going to be used most. Web enabled PDAs and cell-phones (including WebTV, which is is also smaller then 640 pixels) only account for less then 2% of web access (from StatMarket's update last month anyhow)... Is it really worth it? *shrug*

If it's bigger, well, everything after the 640'th pixel is whitespace.

As a designer, this is my biggest beef with the setup... I asked if I could format my pages to stretch with the resolution (not a hard thing to do when we're using all tables), but I was told no... Why?? Considering over 55% of the people out there use 800x600 resolution, that's a lot of wasted space...

Canadian web sites are loaded with tables (for layout purposes only, of course),

What's funny is, they pride themselves on strict adherence to the W3C guidelines, but CSS requires that tables not be used... *shrug*

blank filler GIFs

Inexcusable, considering I created a simple template that meets the guidelines 100% and doesn't need such silliness... lazy prorgramming I guess (although it's more work...)

text as images,

Considering the only font we're aloud to use is Arial, designers are forced to put text with other fonts in an image... bloody annoying, but ever try getting a Mac, Linux and PC looking the exact same thing with Helvetica, Times New Roman and Arial fonts all the same time? Damn tuff...

and things like institutional logos that can't be clicked on (no, you can't click on the Canada "wordmark", you have to click on the bit of text below it that says "Canada Site".

Well, for me, it doesn't say you CAN'T have it clickable... so I made it so... I think most people know to click on logos nowadays...

The CLF also dictates e-mail requirements.

You're right, it's stupid... You can see WHY they thought it up, but still stupid.

Don't get me started about the wonderfully EASY TO REMEMBER bilingual URLs that the CLF requires, nice stuff like www.cio-dpi.gc.ca/clf-upe, www.tbs-sct.gc.ca, etc.

Actually, that's wrong... The guideline says that you can either have a single word that's equal in both languages (justice), the style you mentioned or two domains, one for english and one for french (seperate, but still linked together so people can switch languages)... It's laziness and cheapness that stops people from choosing the third option... it's not the guideline's fault...

Ackkkkk... too looooonnggg.....

Re:Canadian way of doing things...

[Hadean]

Too true... that's beyond my work as a simple designer for individual departments, but I do know they're spending thousands upon thousands to improve their database/search engine... I hope so.. I still haven't even found the simplest thing on their sites yet... Thing is, CLF isn't just about making things pretty.. it enforces us (designers) to use meta tags and such to make the searching easier... hope it works :-/

Re:Canadian way of doing things...

[RhetoricalQuestion]

As a Canadian user who has to actually use these sites, I find them inaccessable. Almost invariable, I can't find what I'm looking for.

Granted, this has improved somewhat over the last few years, but it still needs work. Take a look at the American Government sites -- to me, they seem remarkably complete. It's easy to find the info I need, and then I can print off all the appropriate forms from there.

I recall once I went to the Ontario Ministry of Transportation site with some questions. I couldn't find the answer on the site. There was a submit question form, so I submitted. Several days later they CALLED me with the answer -- as opposed to emailing me.

I could not care less if a government site looked nice. I go to the government site to find information about rules, regulations, procedures, etc. I go to the site because I don't want to waste my time calling, getting put on hold, and then finding out that I called the wrong department. But it seems that I end up wasting my time anyway.

I just want the info. Get all that up there, organized, indexed, cross-referenced and searchable and I'll be happy with almost any look and feel.

Re:Accessibility issues

[Tower]

True, 'most people' who use Windows seem to (because it is the default and they don't care) have the 'Hide Registered Extensions' on, too... they just see an archive icon for zip, gz, etc... tar.gzs would show up as foo.tar with an archive icon, whereas a .zip or .tgz would just list as foo, with an archive icon. The people who don't know the difference usually can't see the difference once it is on their system. Of course, if they bother to look at the filename in the browser...

Well, people get easily confused, it seems.
--

Re:Accessibility issues

[Tower]

Oddly enough, I have no trouble with .zip files under AIX, Linux and BSD. I'm sure they are easy to deal with on a Mac, since I can deal with sit/hqx files on Windows and Linux.

Also note that you can decompress .gz (and .tar.gz s) with WinZip and other Win utils, so you shouldn't worry about those folks being left out in the cold. In fact, with Netscape, it can download the .gz and decompress it to the text file transparently to the user. IE should be able to do this too, but I haven't tested it.

The point is, zips and gzs are pretty standard across multiple platforms.
--

Paper documents online

[yum_icecream]

Here's some assorted thoughts

There's a website called Bobby that will test your site for ADA compliance.
http://www.cast.org/bobby/

If you need/want to make large amounts of paper documents available on-line, these agencies have done a nice job of it.
US Postal Rate Commision http://www.prc.gov/ (Click on Archives)

City of Bakersfield, CA
http://www.ci.bakersfield.ca.us/scripts/LFWebLin k. exe/weblink/browser.html

Collier County, FL Clerk of Courts
http://www.clerk.collier.fl.us/weblink/

City of De Soto, TX
http://www.ci.desoto.tx.us/weblink/

No PDF (was Re:Accessibility issues)

[Simon Brooke]

A lot of what's been written is extremely sensible.

In particular, the KISS principle applies to Web design: the simpler a site design is, the more likely it is to work well on a wide range of devices. This doesn't mean it needs to be ugly -- careful use of stylesheets can produce an elegant, colourful, well laid out design from very simple markup.

Most important is to follow the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines.

However, on one point I'd like to disagree strongly with what's been posted above: I really don't like the use of PDF. It's an exceedingly inflexible format -- after all, inflexibility is precisely what it's designed for. It is most unlikely to be widely accessible on the range of access devices people use and will use. PDF is for people who grew up in the era of flattened dead trees and simply cannot adjust to a world in which text can be presented to meet the needs of the user.

Stick to HTML: the simpler, the better.

Re:Usefulness is important

[WillAdams]

Agree wholeheartedly.

Would urge that you avoid recent version Acrobat .pdfs (none of the v4 .pdfs I've seen on government sites really require Acrobat 4-specific features, and Adobe re-negged on their promise that older versions would always be able to read newer files).

Check with your phone people to find out what the most prevalent queries are and make those prominent---might be able to leverage off research done for your voice mail system.

alt tag all the images and avoid unnecessary gee whiz features. Make the developer try accessing the site over a 14.4KB dial-up every so often.

William


--
Lettering Art in Modern Use

Accessibility, Conformance, Consistency

[Hard_Code]

I think accessiblity is crucial (means using all your 'alts' and 'noframes' tags, etc.). Conformance to the browser/platform -neutral specs is probably important...which plays into accessibility. And my own, personal wish, is some semblance of consistency among government pages. Have *every* page have a standard banner, department/agency emblem, and a link back to the main site. Standardize on this. Make links to parent agencies and departments which also have some standard bannar, or layout, so the poor citizen knows where, among the governmental hierarchy they are at any given point. Government is confusing enough without bad web navigation, etc. It almost warrants something like a governmental "web ring" ;)

Re:Search!

[Cy Guy]

Actually, I could care less how good the local search engine is on the site. Myconcern is that Google and other web-wide search engines have access to the full text of every document on the page. This means that any 'documents' posted in Word/Powerpoint/PDF/etc. also must be posted in vanilla HTML of plain text.

A lot of government websites store supposedly public documents in a database backend, or put a web frontend on their inhouse Lotus Notes system. If the documents are public, then put them where they can be found by web search engines.

Then the site can just put a Google search access from their using the site: attribute.

Re:Accessibility issues

[radja]

zip however has one advantage over tar.gz: most people recognize it as an archive, whereas they have no clue what *.tar.gz is. this may be a reason to use zip rather than tar and gzip.

//rdj

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative

[mnot]

http://www.w3.org/WAI/

Don't forget to design the Website for disabled...

[antdude]

People who have visual problems, can't type, etc. I think this is required by the laws. :)

One state employee's opinion

[MrEfficient]

I work for a state government agency and I also frequent other government web sites looking for information. I think the usability is the most important factor although that isn't specific to government.

I think most people are unaware of exactly what some government agencies do. I think each site should describe the agency's mission and its organizational structure. People come to government web sites to get information, and they should be able to find it quickly. You may want to log the traffic on your site to help you design it more efficiently. Find out which pages people frequent the most and track their path as they navigate your site.

I'm a big data user, if possible provide any data your agency produces which the public may find useful in electronic format. Preferably something everyone can use like delimited text.

Keep the site as simple as possible. I don't mean it shouldn't look good, but for God's sake don't use java or javascript for a link (our site does that and some of the links don't work most of the time), in fact don't use it at all. Server side scripting like asp or php is good if you need it.

Don't assume that everyone has a T1, a 21 inch monitor, and a 1 ghz processor. Design your site so that the user at home with a 15 inch monitor, a 56k modem, and a pentium 200 can reasonably access it.

And finally, please, please do not use frames.

Re:Accessibility issues

[MrEfficient]

People also like Word documents, but I'm a lot less eager to support that format for a whole lot of reasons (cross-platform issues, cross-version issues, macro viruses, Word sucks, etc :).

Please don't use Word, or Wordperfect, or any format that someone can't read for free. PDFs are good, but if your using the latest version, make sure that older PDF readers can use them. And of course HTML or plain text is acceptable.

Usefulness is important

[mikej]

Of course it's important to be 'accessible', but beyond that, make it _useful_. An exceptionally bad design, for example, is the New Jersey Transit homepage. I can't see a complete line schedule for the trains, and all of the bus schedules are scanned PDFs (meaning I can't text search anything).

A slightly better example is the Texas state homepage. There's lots of information available about laws and whatnot, but unfortunately none of it is searchable. On the state legislation page there is (as far as I can tell) a complete legislation listing, but none of it has been indexed.

If I could make one suggestion, it would be this: Include a search capability.

Strategis

[Fjord]

I like Strategis.

the first page is simple and offers a choice of english or french

the next page has the search and index prominantly displayed

There is a crap load of information on there

Look to LDP

[Wellspring]

Disclaimer: I am an embittered former federal employee, not a lawyer. Advice which follows is from experience. ;)

A key problem isn't technology related. Government information has typically been inaccessible in general. Your web design might present it in a way which doesn't put up obstacles, but the fundamental problem is that things are extremely complicated. Also, if you are like the agency I used to work for, you'll be overwhelmed with a mountain of government regulations on how your page is designed, and what kind of back end you could use. In my agency, Zope and PHP were banned, for instance, and perl scripts had to be approved by a committee of non-programmers-- ie they were effectively banned, too.

1) Don't design to internal, organizational boundaries. From the outside, a government is a single monolithic entity, and people won't know what entity (or more likely, entities) their problem falls under.

An alternative is to design similarly to the Linux Documentation project. Have a series of howtos, based around basic tasks (for instance, property tax rebates, or disaster loans, or filing an environmental complaint). To take disaster loans as an example, you could tell them how to contact the federal Small Business Administration, your state government equivalent, your state Emergency Management Agency, your Department of Agriculture, as well as what they can reasonably expect through each avenue. Include a checklist, troubleshooting section (include a link to the State Legislature email list-- you'll take some heat from the executive branch, but it is a definite plus for your constituents).

2) Design a knowledge base (plenty of shrink-wrapped stuff is available if you can get it through procurement). When questions are asked, the responses can come from the agencies themselves, along with links to relevent information.

Basically, when you buy from IBM or General Electric, you don't go fishing around for someone who can help you (ok, you do, but not as much as you do in government). Ultimately, treat your state as a single entity providing services, and hide the internal details of government as much as possible.

You will, I guarantee, experience a major headache trying to do a good job. Press, the public sector equivalent of marketing, will demand that their agency have special billing and its own section that they can play with-- more than just the 'general information' that they need, they'll want everything related to their agency on its own page. Legal/Ethics will want to control what technology you use and how you use it. The executives will want their initiatives to take top billing over the things people will actually use your site for. There is no 'customer service' per se; most is run out of the offices of the elected officials. So you won't have people to hold responsible for populating the knowledge base with knowledge. Most agency employees only know their own agency, and aren't in any case accountable for their contribution to the web effort.

It is a major challenge, and I don't envy you. Ultimately, to make it work, you'll need to push very hard, and get buyin at the Governor's office. But good luck: people don't realize how hard government employees work to, despite everything, get the work done, and done well.

What content is best?

[SethJohnson]

I recommend that you survey the various employees of the agency to find out what questions people call in and ask the most often. Make links available at the top level of the site's heirarchy to this info. Maps, addresses, and phone numbers will usually fall into this category. If you've got a huge repository of official documents, do some analysis of which documents are most frequently viewed. You can use a simple web log analyzer to figure it out and then perhaps have a gutter on the right side of the document search page that includes links to these frequently requested documents.

Seth

Universal Access is key

[cybermage]

For a goverment site, 'Universal Access' should be paramount. Here's a link to a site called Bobby which will test sites for access and has explainations on how to comply with W3C recommendations for accessiblity.

--

Cold Fusion State Site

[StoryMan]

Here's the URL for the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.

All done in Cold Fusion, MS SQL back-end:

http://www.icjia.state.il.us

The site contains a full content admin section, pages are set to expire at specific dates, etc.

My favorite gov site

[tcd004]

is The National Archives and Records Administration page

Their search engine for the nail database is awesome too.

tcd004
Janet RenoMargolis

Re:Make them printer-friendly - With Acrobat!

[milletre]

Two words: Adobe Acrobat. A couple people mentioned the IRS site. One of the reasons it's usable is because forms are readable online, can be filled in online, and then can be printed with predictable results. It only costs $100, and, once you've learned your way around, can be used to very effectively standardize not only presentation of information to the public, but internal paperwork as well. Having an archive of .PDF files ready to print when someone needs x or y form has proven invaluable to my wife's office streamlining efforts.

Check out Europa

[cheekymonkey_68]

Europa is the web portal for the European Union (which could be considered a government in actualité).

Its a non-US government site but is very well designed for its purpose.

Whats good about their site:

Most web pages available in a choice of 11 languages (US English excluded ;) )

Whats new section detailing daily events in the EU and new web pages uploaded

Custom search engine

More than one method available to find information i.e. search engine, menus, by subject

Heavily text based, i.e still usable for the visually impaired or on text based browsers (ie Lynx)

User centred design (Obligatory Kharma Whoring Nielson reference)

Like Slashdot the site is updated on a daily basis, so the content is never out of date

Re:Make them printer-friendly

[kirn_malinus]

Making them printer friendly brings in a lot of basic elements of the design of a site like this. The first thing they have to consider is their target audience. As a government agency the target audience is probably very broad, ranging down to users with 640x480 resolutions with 256 colors, and no support for frames and javascript.

I too have been involved in the design of a few gov't web sites. One thing we have learned is that you have to design for that audience. Use only the web safe color palatte and do not let your page width exceed 600 pixels (think about scroll bars and such). If you meet these basic requirements for on screen viewing, printer-friendliness should come along naturally.

It is my belief that most web sites should be contracted out. Unless you already have a dedicated and talented web department, you will be happier with the results if you use a local agency. You should be able to find one that accomodates your needs.

________________________________________________ _______

Just don't...

[ZoneGray]

Well, whatever you do, don't let the Florida courts design them.

First you'll miss your deadlines, then they'll decide that your deadlines weren't important, and then when they do finally finish the design, the legistlature will overrule them.

Basic Government

[Luminous]

People come to a government website to get the info they need and leave to have more time to download mp3's.

Make sure all information can be printed in a nice format.

When developing the search system, make sure the results page returns valuable information. I hate going to a site that is filled with articles, laws, or other non-bite sized information and doing a search where the results page only gives me a generic title and a relevency score (GovDoc#134, 83%). 20 plus of these documents means a page of useless information where I have to visit each one, do a find in page search to see it that document is what I need. If the search results page gave back a summary of each link and offered a meaningful title, I'd at least be able to weed out the documents that I know won't apply.

I do agree access is important so if you have a place where people can submit email forms, make sure there is an autoreply and tracking number system. If there is not a person assigned to respond or triage those emails, it is better not to offer that option. For me, emails are 'fire-and-forget'. If the form is provided for me, and I use it, I expect timely action from it.

If the governmental agency is suited for that kind of interaction then let the website visitor know up front that a phonecall is the best way contact the agency.

The other thing that annoys me is a governmental website that tries to look pretty. Flash is great, but it makes me wonder, as I wait for the site to load, how much of my tax money went to design it. Utilitarian design and navigation is the answer with enough graphical verve to look interesting but not too much to make me forget I am on a government website.

And in response to the hacking issue, I know the US government has two types of security, absolute and none. If personal information is collected from the website, I want tons of guarantees of privacy. If you cannot provide the security necessary, don't provide a service that collects personal information.

Thanks, then Redundant Redundancy

[ichimunki]

Great link, thanks. I want to emphasize one of his primary points. Text is actually text. I don't care how gifted you are with the alt tag, using graphics when they are not necessary is really annoying. I find it amusing that he uses a right-arrow graphic on his navigation bar at the top, but it is alt="->" why not just use the "=>" in the first place, or some variation on that theme, like >>?

For a while I used to think the old web (back in the Mosaic days) was ugly, and was thankful for the new, enhanced pages which were so pretty. Until most designers took all that stuff way too far. Now, especially with government sites, I think every page should work well with text browsers. This is important since the user base has a right to get at your information and access should not be an issue (and AFAIK most accessibility solutions rely on standards which tend to render well in Lynx-type browswers).

I also think any downloadable information provided on government sites should be in a form which is as platform independent as possible. Text goes in .txt files, which can be provided inside of .tgz, .sit, and .zip files if they are large. Pictures should probably be JPG-- GIF is great for inline transparency and animation tricks, but haven't there been some patent issues? PNG is great in theory, but face facts, it's just not a standard option yet. If you have spreadsheet type data, please include a csv or some other delimited file. Please avoid .doc, .xls, and .pdf.

Government web sites should strive to be cutting-edge not in the human interface department, but in the back-end department, with rigorous server-side work to assist in indexing, searching, organization, maintenance, and things like that. If my tax dollars are at work, I'd prefer them to be used to get the information together and to make it accessible. Any money spent paying designers to write little roll-overs and flashy graphics is not efficient. It hasn't added enough value to most dotcoms to get them out of the red ink, and it's not adding value to the state either.

Re:Thanks, then Redundant Redundancy

[ichimunki]

I realize that the way I put it implies that I think PDF is platform dependent. Yes, it works better on some systems, and I've seen some instances where a PDF from one platform looks different on a different platform, but mostly my gripe is with how inaccessible it makes the information. It's great if you want to distribute forms intended for printing, like tax forms, but that's about it. Personally I'd prefer .txt, .csv, and .jpg for just about anything-- with perhaps the PDF as an option, not a requirement.

Good public sector site: transitinfo.org

[sulli]

In the Bay Area, Transit Info has schedules, maps, and info on a huge variety of transit providers, most or all of which are public-sector agencies or nonprofit corporations. Since the Bay Area's transit infrastructure is highly Balkanized (something like 30 agencies!) this is the best way to get information on how to get around - and it's very simple, user-friendly, and not cluttered with the kind of noise you usually get from overzealous web designers.

This should be an example to anyone designing a web site distributing customer information, in my opinion.

Re:Should the government be spend money on website

[pruneau]

Quebec Gov. is nice.
Last year, I dared to submit my tax return form both for Canada and Quebec over the web, and when my software crashed (@#$@#%^!!), the site was extremely usefull to

find the site where my (@#$@#$^%) software was going

submit the data myself

have the submission tracked

have everything clearly explained

Even with the widely advertised langage bigotism of Quebec people, their site is in English, French and Spanish (Tough not everything is translated...). I think this is mandatory for any country aware of the rest of the world.
And like pointed by other comments, it is mean primarily as a directory toward what might be interestring you, and the search facility is really working.

I've got a suggestion

[atrowe]

I'm kind of new 2 web design, but I've been doing alot of work on my AOL homepage lately. I think U should use lots of animated gifs. Use as many as possible. U can never have kewl enough animated gifs on ur web page.

Re:I've got a suggestion

[atrowe]

Oh yeah, I 4got. Use the -blink- tag alot too.

Think like the user.

[Mrs_Miller]

The biggest issue is what users are looking for. Things should be organized the way users think of them. Sure a powerful search engine will help some, but effective organization and naming conventions will be even more powerful. So if, for example, you have a section on vehicle and transportation policy, don't call it Vehicle & Transportation Policy. Call it something intuitive to the user (e.g. Stuff about Your Car). I good search engine should be a fall back, not the prime navigation tool. Catagorize items around the users life, not the bureaucrat's Policy Manual. Someone will more likely ask "Can I burn that there old outhouse in my backyard?" than "What are the residential zoning requirements of my neighborhood?" And no one is going to a government page for entertainment. Skip the Flash, no one's going to say "Hey, you seen that killer Flash intro at the DMV homepage?"

Country of Copenhagen, Denmark

[jlycke]

I was the technical lead on the team that created the country of Copenhagens website.

All frames and image (except blank) have names that make it easy to navigate for blind people. We used lynx to test all the pages and if we could get around with lynx, we changed that part of the website.

There are no flash, director, java etc on the site.

The search engine does freetext search and displays it ordered by category (news, contacts etc.)

Everything is run by databases and if an office changes address, phone number etc, all occurrences of this information is changed everywhere on the site immediately to avoid old information being on the site.

The are also features as printer friendly format and sitemap.

They were pretty happy with the site and won a price for best information management by a Danish government website.

Re:Make them printer-friendly

[Ed Avis]

BTW, I always use the printer-friendly version (if there is one) for ordinary Web browsing.

The BBC's website has a CGI script Betsie which automatically generates an 'accessible' version of a web page. But this is not an ideal solution, it would be better to write the page in an accessible way to start with. HTML-linters like Bobby, Weblint, and Tidy, not to mention just validating properly with nsgmls, can help here. Also read the W3C's accessibility guidelines.

But I don't mean to rant too much on the web purist's favourite topic of alt tags and not using tables for layout. I mean, it's not as if I even use Lynx for browsing. One thing I would like to have is a clear sense of real people behind the site. This means having a contact address (or at least a link to a contact page) on every page, and where appropriate, other meta-data like which department is responsible for this page, where the information comes from, when it was last updated, and so on.

Also try to make your URLs last a reasonably long time (i.e. not like microsoft.com, for anyone familiar with that site). This means that people can bookmark a site containing useful information and go back to the same page later. It also helps search engines.

Finally, it might be a good idea to support SSL connections and get a certificate, possibly signed by the government itself. That way people can feel reassured that 'the bad guys' aren't getting in the way.

My thoughts

[Ex Machina]

Dos

1. Be sure to get it indexed on all the major search engines and directories
2. Include a local search feature (even if it is only Google's site search feature)
3. Include contact information
4. Meta tags to enable easier finding of info.
5. Accessability!

Don'ts

1. Shockwave, Java, IE/Netscape tags, (excessive) javascript (all sections should worth with or without it)
2. Don't make any page more than ~4 clicks from the main page.
3. Here are some (karma whoring) tips from Tim Berners-Lee and Friends
4. Don't link to goatse.cx

Re:Accessibility issues

[PapaZit]

I disagree with some of these:

Text should be in a table with a width of approx 200 - 500 pxls.

Let people decide this with their browsers, and never specify sizes in pixels. It looks awful on small monitors (say, PDAs, or Grandma's 640x480 monitor), and it's awful AND hard to read on a 1600x1200 display.

Do NOT put large amounts of text into a single, monolithic table. This may cause a user's browser to have to wait for the whole page to be loaded until they see any text.

This is a government web site, not a sales site. The goal is complete and accurate information, not loading speed. You need to realize that there are some people who HAVE to use special browsers (blind, etc.), and there are others who just don't want to use IE or Netscape, and these users would rather have all of their information in a single block rather than having their browser say "left-brace table right-brace left-brace tee arr right-brace left-brace tee dee right-brace" etc. before and after each paragraph.

Use sans-serif fonts

No. Let the user choose his own fonts in his browser. You're wrong about serifs and readability. Sans-serif is easier to read when the words are unfamiliar (proper nouns, technical jargon, etc.). Serifed fonts are easier to read for normal text, so long as the reader understands the words that are being used.

Give links for a zip-file of all text

There are many people, particularly in this august forum, who do not use windows. For these people, zip files are an inconvenience. Providing plain text files is a good idea, though.

--

Re:Accessibility issues

[radja]

-if you're going to include M$ word documents.. make sure they're also available in plain text or html.
-look at it with lynx. it should be readable. this is a decent test to see if it's accessible to the blind
-no flash, or at least offer an alternative. it's not nice to require viewers to download a plugin.
-no banners
-no cookies
-a searchengine (htdig?)

//rdj

Re:Accessibility issues

[babbage]

These are all excellent suggestions. I'd also append onto #5 that PDFs are appreciated by a lot of people. I think it's annoying to use them most of the time, but others disagree and that's okay -- they're cross platform and print well, so they're worth using. People also like Word documents, but I'm a lot less eager to support that format for a whole lot of reasons (cross-platform issues, cross-version issues, macro viruses, Word sucks, etc :).

I'd also point out Philip Greenspun's scorecard.org, a clearing house for environmental data. It's a very accessible, data-rich site that might be a sort of model for things a government data-distribution site could do.

Accessibility issues

[jamienk]

Just a few ideas:

If you have a lot of text:

1) Limit the width that the text can flow -- do not allow it to expand to full browser width. Text should be in a table with a width of approx 200 - 500 pxls.

2) Use style sheets to make the LINE-HEIGHT at least 1.2 if not 1.3 or 1.4. The extra leading will be appreciated as it will make for easier reading.

3) Do NOT put large amounts of text into a single, monolithic table. This may cause a user's browser to have to wait for the whole page to be loaded until they see any text. This may seem contrary to #1, where text is required to be in a table. The solution -- put blocks of text (maybe on a paragraphy-by paragraph basis) into their own separate tables of fixed width. This will allow the text to load progressively. (see search results on Half.com for a good example.)

4) Use sans-serif fonts -- verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif -- specified in style sheets. This improves readability, and will cut down on page size by not requiring a million *font* tags.

5) Give links for a zip-file of all text in a plain format. Users can then open it in their favorite word processor to print, copy to pda, etc.

Please! No Flash!

[cheesyfru]

Flash immediately destroys the accessibility of the site to a large portion of your audience, and frustrates many of the rest of them. Not only do users need the Flash plugin (which some have and many don't), it kills the usability of many of the features of a browser (try bookmarking, copy/pasting, using the Find command, etc). I've never seen a site done in Flash that couldn't be done in HTML -- if you're trying to make a site easier to use, there are better ways to do it rather than giving your users a whole new set of controls to learn. Please, stick to basics!

Jakob Nielsen has a great article covering this, see http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html .
---
Josh Woodward

One thing that is important for a government site

[Richy_T]

Have a contact e-mail. Don't have a form submission version (user doesn't get a copy). Do have an automatic confirmation. Do make sure that somebody is assigned to check it regularly.

Nothing worse than sending off an e-mail and not knowing if it's even been received, yet alone if anyone's ever going to read it.

I'm speaking to you, david shepard

Rich

Don't be a Toad

[e_lehman]

DO NOT waste space toadying to your chief bureaucrat at the expense of useful content.

For example, the top of the menu bar at NASA is a paean to NASA administrator Daniel Goldin: links to his bio, his welcome letter, his speeches. Click hot topics and the menu bar full of juicy Dan Goldin information is still there. In contrast, try to find out what's up with the NEAR mission to Eros. Go ahead-- I gave up.

This problem isn't isolated. Pick another site, say Department of Commerce. The "tribute link" to the chief bureaucrat is top-right, and you get a biography, speeches, op-eds, even "official photographs".

Here's the USDA site, where prime position is taken by a big picture of Secretary Glickman at the ribbon cutting for a new wing of the Dept. of Agriculture.

Gag.

Access to what people want

[EnderPax]

I work in DC as a web development trainer for this company.

</credentials>

There are a few things you can do to make your website work better for your clientele:

• Accessibility is key. Don't go too fancy with the design. Make sure that the interface makes sense. Provide a text-only version.
• View your logs. Learn where people are going. Make that stuff more accessible so that people don't have to go through a lot of links to get to what they want. Believe it or not, the IRS is a really good example of this. If you're really hip, you can write a web log analyzer that posts the top ten favorite links.
• Get a sensible URL for your agency. The INS used to be www.ins.usdoj.gov. Now it's www.ins.gov. That makes sense.
• You're presenting regulatory requirements? Post a FAQ. Talk to the people who field phone calls for the agency. Find out what questions they get. Post them in the FAQ.
• Provide an area for feedback on the website. React to it. The toughest part about building a web site is that you are, to a certain extent, groping in the dark. You should expect that the first version of the website should change a bit in the first few months. Make it modular. In the first year, you'll make a lot of changes, but after that, the pace of change will drop dramatically.

• My $.02

Step 1: Listen to Jakob Nielsen

[Paul Crowley]

The guru of Web usability got the title through being right a lot. Check out his website and buy his book, Designing Web Usability.

There may be a whole load of specific issues to consider, but on the general issue of making a website that people can stand to use, he's your man.
--

Good and Bad: irs.gov

[sachmet]

Every time I go to the IRS web site (www.irs.gov), they always have these cheesy "articles" about how people are using IRS services to make their life SO EASY... quite frankly, it's rather annoying.

However, that said, I rarely have a problem finding information on their site within, say, 5 clicks. So that's a plus on the usability front. But if you're looking for design, don't "steal" from the IRS. :-)

My ideas

[wemmick]

Yes, accessibility is a good keyword.

I think the the new Washington, DC government page (washingtondc.gov) is actually a pretty good site.

Right on the front page there are links for "Today in DC", including meetings, weather, and (very important) closures.

There's a link to an alphabetic list of DC Government agencies. Most of these subsites contain relevant information like contact information, hours of operation, procedures, an deven forms in some cases.

In fact, I've had better luck getting information from the DC website than I have trying to get somebody to answer the phone.

Now if only we had real congressional representation...
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Check out the UK government web site

[Paul Johnson]

Its here. It is truly excellent. Not just regulatory stuff, but lots of general info. The Environment Agency provides clickable maps of environmental problems in your area, for instance (currently running a limited service due to load from people afraid of flooding).

As for how to present regulatory info, the main thing is to think from the user's point of view. E.g. "I'm running a photographic processing shop with 10 employees. What do I need to do to comply with waste management/employment/tax laws?". Then present information in that kind of format.

Oh, and put a good site search engine on the front end, and if you have any database system for accessing data then see if you can figure out how to let outside search engines see the data as well.

Paul.

Accessibility? Call Bobby!

[jamused]

So far the best tool I've found for helping to make sure your site is accessible is Bobby, a free service provided by CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) to check websites versus usability standards. It can be run online, or there's a downloadable version, and generates a prioritized report of everything that you have to look at and potentially fix to help special browsers (such as text-to-speech) function better.

Search!

[eli173]

Make it organized. But more importantly,

You need a powerful search capability.

Say I want to know about the legality of putting extra lights of various colors on my truck...
Or where to register to vote...
Or who to contact about the title of a vehicle...

There are a lot of questions one can ask of a state government--provide a way for us to ask them.

Eli

Make them printer-friendly

[Thaddeus]

As someone who has designed a few government web-sites in the past, probably the number one demanded feature is printer-friendliness. Usually the pages are full of detailed info of which many visitors will want a hard copy. If you have too many images (especially large ones), outlandish formatting, or even a black background, it won't come out right for a lot of people. If you absolutely need to put that kind of thing in there, consider making a second, plainer version with a 'Printer Friendly' link to it.

Got it in One

[StormyMonday]

I think the key word for government sites is 'accessibility'.

Bullseye.

The rules for content are simple:

• The users have to be able to find it.
• The users have to be able to read it.

The first item means that you have to be really careful how you lay out your site navigation. Other posters have some good suggestions here. In particular, consider how your users will try to find things. Hint -- it aint by regulation number.

It is also important to provide your data in a usable form. Thomas is a particularly bad example here. This site lists bills before the US Congress. Unfortunately, the "real" text of the bills is almost invariably in the form of a diff to a current law; it's impossible to tell what's going on without reference to the original, and even then, it's not easy.

In terms of fancy layout, etc:

• Take the graphic designers out and shoot them.
• Delete all the fancy "web design" tools. Anybody who uses a tool more sophisticated than Homesite will be designated a "graphic designer" and shot. Anybody can learn enough HTML to format a basic page in about 10 minutes.
• All testers must connect to your pages at no more than 14400 bits/sec. Broadband connections and local Ethernets are specifically forbidden.

In particular:

• Don't make assumptions about your users' hardware or software. In particular, don't assume any particular screen size or browser.
• No animation, Shockwave, graphics maps, Java, Javascript, background music, etc. Duh!
• User defaults are your friend; style sheets are your enemy. In particular, don't mess with fonts. Every commercial site out there tries to force me to read a tiny, san-serif font. Every usability study I've ever seen shows that serif fonts (Times Roman, for example) are more readable.
• Don't use tables for layout. They don't improve readability and they slow things down. Use tables for tables, and don't make assumptions about your users' screen size or resolution.
• Use graphics only when necessary and keep them small. Use the minimum color and resolution that you can get away with. Don't forget the ALT tags.
• Validate your HTML. There are a number of HTML validatiors out there; find one you like and use it. Amazing how often this gets forgotten ....

Above all, look at it! Look at it with every browser you can find. Don't forget the old versions. (And don't forget Lynx.) Get some blind (excuse me, Visually Impared) testers if at all possible to "look" at it with screen magnifiers and screen readers. Look at it over slow lines.

Note that, depending on the laws in your area, you may have specific requirements that won't fit these (or probably, any) guidelines (line numbering, fonts, etc). In this case, you may be limited to letting folks download a PDF file. Even in this case you should be able to post your HTML regs "for information only" and tell people to refer to the PDF for the "real" regs.

Anyway, good luck! One advantage of the current crowd of crap Webpages is that it's easy to look good.
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