10. Care About Your Brand
Dipnote, the State Department's blog that sounds suspiciously affiliated with rap collective Dipset, has a sleek, elegant, black logo/seal right on top. It seems to say: "This blog is cool in its own right. Don't feel you have to read it out of sympathy just because it's the State Dept's blog. We've already got street cred."
In other words, the design really makes you think the State Department is on top of the cabinet game and are doing something innovative. If other agencies follow suit and web traffic then increases, government websites might witness some legitimate, constructive blog discussions.
9. Columns Rule
For intuitiveness, nothing works better than verticality. On a busy home page, "bubbles" or "clouds" of information tend to have little logic and are confusing to scan. You know those websites that you have to look around in a clockwise motion 3 times before your eyes land on the heading you want? Columns are simpler, intuitive, easy to read, and expected, although far from flashy.
8. A Splash of Flash Goes a Long Way
Look at all the best private sector websites; they are monstrosities of Flash graphics that take a full 30 seconds to load on a fast connection. Now I'm not saying we should be forced to watch a slide show of Tim Geithner action shots before getting to the main menu of the Treasury Department website, but a little more pizzazz will end the phenomenon of feeling like you're going back in time eight years when you look at government websites.
7. Deploy Clarity
Don't hide links behind tabs or dropdown buttons so the page looks nicer-it takes forever to find what you need to click on because links are often stuffed into categories that don't fit perfectly. Remember, there is usually a disconnect between how the government categorizes things and how a normal person with little experience in these matters would. So before classifying material under a heading, poke around the Internet to find the most common nomenclature, instead of resorting to Govspeak.
Take the FCC website for instance, it's depressingly ugly in a Soviet architecture kind of way, but it's very navigable because every clickable thing on the entire website is laid out on the front page, not hiding in menus. This makes it easier to find, since the user doesn't need to think like a Govie.
The State Department's combination of a flash slideshow, "quick links," and conventional drop down menus also works pretty well as a happy medium between easy navigation and aesthetics.
6. Recognize Traffic Patterns
In addition to "quick links," some government sites have added the even more direct "most requested links." This is a really effective means of organizing the site, and a best-practice for web design. There are services offered, such as Google Analytics and Crazy Egg that can show heat maps of where traffic is the greatest. This should be done quarterly, at the least to determine how information deeper in the site may be brought to the front page, so that users can find what they are looking for more easily.
5. Introduce Your Mission
Don't assume everyone stumbling on a site knows what that given federal department does. A welcoming statement and clear indication of the department's role-in other words what it does for the average citizens who may be viewing the website-doesn't take up much room and is great for clarity. This not only helps the user understand your agency's mission, it also helps him/her determine if they have reached the right website. That way, if they are looking for healthcare data and you are a Commerce site, he/she can bug out of there quickly to find the right landing page.
4. Give The People What They Want
The Treasury Department is launching a new website called FinancialStability.com that exists to "provide the American people with information about the Obama Administration's efforts to stabilize our financial system." It sounds almost too good to be true coming from Washington, but if it's no joke, then this should set an example for all agency sites in terms of transparency and catering information to the will of the people, instead of the will of the Public Affairs Department. Read the news and comments left on the news to determine what information people are searching for and work to supply. Not only is this helpful, it keeps them from asking us to find it for them.
3. Design For Multiple Browsers
Just because your entire office is a slave to Microsoft, don't assume everyone else is. Macbook is now the hottest selling notebook, and guess what, it doesn't come with Internet Explorer. So be aware of the generational gaps between web browsers and be sure to design the website to look good in Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox. And try to keep up with the new versions. They come out annually people. The same holds true for file types. Now more than ever, Windows-based media products cause problems for those driving Apple products. So be courteous and provide the files in multiple formats.
2. "Search Engine Optimization"
How will anyone see your agency's great new website if it doesn't come up on Google? The use of that site revolutionized how people surf the web...years ago. So raise the firewalls and let searchers find what is commonly called "the deep web," those places on your site that lay protected from Google crawlers. The risk of someone stumbling upon a contact form submission on the wrong page is outweighed by the benefit of them finding what they need, quickly. So help a surfer out and put some extra effort into optimizing your content for search tools. This ensures more people who cite your stats instead of those of Wikipedia.
1. Embrace Web 2.0
It seems like Americans today have an insatiable appetite for displaying their opinions on the Internet in any way possible. Let them! It is a useful and cheap, although admittedly not scientific, way to gauge public opinion. It can provide feedback on any given issue that is not veiled by polling questions, and it is good PR for agencies to seem to be reaching out to the laypeople.
Godspeed.
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