Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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PDF cannot guarantee this. No format can.
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Xenu loves you!
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?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
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?
-- Solaris Central - http://w
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.
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
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.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
* 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.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
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...
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
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
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.
.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.
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
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 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.)
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...)
;-p )
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...
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.
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
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.
.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.
Also note that you can decompress
The point is, zips and gzs are pretty standard across multiple platforms.
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Here's some assorted thoughts
n k. exe/weblink/browser.html
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/LFWebLi
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/
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.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Agree wholeheartedly.
.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).
Would urge that you avoid recent version Acrobat
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
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Lettering Art in Modern Use
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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" ;)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
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
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
People who have visual problems, can't type, etc. I think this is required by the laws. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
Check out AbiWord.
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.
Check out AbiWord.
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.
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
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
-no broken link
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.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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.
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Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
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?
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.
Their search engine for the nail database is awesome too.
tcd004
Janet RenoMargolis
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.
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
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.
_______________________________________________
All circuits busy.
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.
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.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
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 >>?
.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.
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
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.
I do not have a signature
This should be an example to anyone designing a web site distributing customer information, in my opinion.
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
[Pruneau
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.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
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?"
-We're all pink and squishy on the inside.
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.
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.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
- Be sure to get it indexed on all the major search engines and directories
- Include a local search feature (even if it is only Google's site search feature)
- Include contact information
- Meta tags to enable easier finding of info.
- Accessability!
Don'tsText 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.
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Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
-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
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
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.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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.
Jakob Nielsen has a great article covering this, see http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html .
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Josh Woodward
Josh Woodward
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
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.
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:
My $.02
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.
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Xenu loves you!
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.
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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Cognitive Overflow
more than yo
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.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
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.
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
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.
^X^S ^X^C
I think the key word for government sites is 'accessibility'.
Bullseye.
The rules for content are simple:
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:
In particular:
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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Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.