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The Internet

How Should Government Web Sites Be Designed? 245

Posted by Cliff from the stuff-to-talk-about dept.
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?
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How Should Government Web Sites Be Designed? More

How Should Government Web Sites Be Designed?

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  • Some simple guidelines... (Score:1)

    by 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.. (Score:1)

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

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

  • 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 (Score:1)

    by Seumas ( 6865 )
    Actually, the United States Patent Office [uspto.gov] 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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • "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 favorite government website is www.whitehouse.com

    Love the design and quick access to information.
  • 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.

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

  • What? (Score:1)

    by KFury ( 19522 )
    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
  • 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.

  • 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!

  • 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

  • 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 [open.gov.uk] site uses:

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

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


    --
  • New Mexico's state site [state.nm.us] 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.
  • 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

  • > 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.

  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
    --

  • PDF cannot guarantee this. No format can.
    --

  • Yes. (Score:2)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    The biggest problem with government websites is government. My personal example is the FCC [ncsu.edu].

    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 [ncsu.edu].
  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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 [dmoz.org]-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 [sunbiz.org] 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 [sun.com] isn't a government site, but has lots of information that is fairly well organized in the manner I mentioned above.
  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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.


    ---
  • * 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.
  • 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 [osd.mil] 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...

  • 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 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 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 [cio-dpi.gc.ca]. 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 )
  • 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.....
  • 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 :-/
  • 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.
    --
  • 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.
    --
  • 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/

  • 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 [w3.org] 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.

  • 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
  • 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" ;)
  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 [njtransit.com]. 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 [state.tx.us]. There's lots of information available about laws and whatnot, but unfortunately none of it is searchable. On the state legislation [state.tx.us] 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 [htdig.org].

  • I like Strategis [ic.gc.ca].

    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

  • 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.



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

    --
  • 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.
  • is The National Archives and Records Administration page [nara.gov]

    Their search engine for the nail database is awesome too.

    tcd004
    Janet RenoMargolis [lostbrain.com]

  • 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 [irs.gov], 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.
  • Europa [eu.int] 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

  • 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.


    ________________________________________________ _______
  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • In the Bay Area, Transit Info [transitinfo.org] has schedules, maps, and info on a huge variety of transit providers, most or all of which are public-sector [sfmuni.com] agencies [bart.gov] or nonprofit corporations [rides.org]. 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.

  • Quebec Gov. [gouv.qc.ca] 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'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.
  • Oh yeah, I 4got. Use the -blink- tag alot too.

  • 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.

  • 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?"
  • I was the technical lead on the team that created the country of Copenhagens website [kbh-amt.dk].

    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 it work fast - (Score:3)

    by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:16AM (#572822) Homepage Journal
    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:Make them printer-friendly (Score:3)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:42AM (#572823) Homepage

    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 [bbc.co.uk] 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 [cast.org], Weblint [weblint.org], and Tidy [w3.org], not to mention just validating properly with nsgmls, can help here. Also read the W3C's accessibility guidelines [w3.org].

    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 (Score:3)

    by Ex Machina ( 10710 ) <jonathan.william ... inus threevowels> on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:46AM (#572824) Homepage
    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! [w3.org]
    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 [w3.org] are some (karma whoring) tips from Tim Berners-Lee and Friends
    4. Don't link to goatse.cx

  • Re:Accessibility issues (Score:3)

    by PapaZit ( 33585 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:09AM (#572825)
    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 (Score:3)

    by radja ( 58949 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:01AM (#572826) Homepage
    -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 (Score:3)

    by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdevers.cis@usouthal@edu> on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:20AM (#572827) Homepage Journal
    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 [greenspun.com] scorecard.org [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 (Score:3)

    by jamienk ( 62492 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:51AM (#572828)
    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! (Score:3)

    by cheesyfru ( 99893 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:06AM (#572829) Homepage
    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 (Score:3)

    by Richy_T ( 111409 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @01:49PM (#572830) Homepage
    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 [state.tn.us]

    Rich

  • Don't be a Toad (Score:3)

    by e_lehman ( 143896 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @09:06AM (#572831)

    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 [nasa.gov] is a paean to NASA administrator Daniel Goldin: links to his bio, his welcome letter, his speeches. Click hot topics [nasa.gov] 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 [commerce.gov]. The "tribute link" [doc.gov] to the chief bureaucrat is top-right, and you get a biography, speeches, op-eds, even "official photographs".

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

    Gag.

  • Access to what people want (Score:3)

    by EnderPax ( 173293 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:53AM (#572832) Homepage
    <credentials>

    I work in DC as a web development trainer for this [westlake.com] 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 (Score:4)

    by Paul Crowley ( 837 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:47AM (#572833) Homepage Journal
    The guru of Web usability got the title through being right a lot. Check out his website [useit.com] 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 (Score:4)

    by sachmet ( 10423 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:42AM (#572834)
    Every time I go to the IRS web site (www.irs.gov [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 (Score:4)

    by wemmick ( 22057 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:46AM (#572835) Journal
    Yes, accessibility is a good keyword.

    I think the the new Washington, DC government page (washingtondc.gov [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...
    --

  • Check out the UK government web site (Score:4)

    by Paul Johnson ( 33553 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:43AM (#572836) Homepage
    Its here [open.gov.uk]. 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! (Score:4)

    by jamused ( 125583 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:23AM (#572837) Homepage

    So far the best tool I've found for helping to make sure your site is accessible is Bobby [cast.org], 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! (Score:4)

    by eli173 ( 125690 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:43AM (#572838)
    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 (Score:5)

    by Thaddeus ( 14369 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:46AM (#572839)
    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 (Score:5)

    by StormyMonday ( 163372 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @08:19AM (#572840) Homepage

    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 [loc.gov] 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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