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How Not to do a State Website Makeover

Posted by Mark Headd under News, Open Government

The Twitters have been abuzz lately with news of lots of state government websites being updated. California, Texas and Massachusetts have all made dramatic changes to their state websites to better serve citizens.

One recent state website overhaul was of particular interest to me - that of my current state of Delaware.

Before I offer my critique and tell you what I like and don’t like about the new Delaware.gov website, I should say that my opinion is somewhat biased. I was the Director of the Delaware Government Information Center during a previous Administration and the project manager of the effort to overhaul the old Gov 1.0 state web site and create a new citizen-focused web portal. The project I oversaw resulted in the first Delaware state web site to use the “delaware.gov” domain name.

The project I worked on was difficult - it took a lot of effort to get buy-in from agencies and agreement from them to relinquish some of the control they had over their old stovepiped web sites and work to incorporate their information into a centralized portal. For it’s time, it was a dramatic step forward and the state received national recognition for its efforts. The project had strong support from almost every elected official in the state. In particular, the effort was spearheaded by then State Treasurer Jack Markell - the man who is now Governor.

It should come as no surprise then that I have strong feelings about how the Delaware web site is designed, and how well it serves the citizens of Delaware. In my opinion, the new site design has a number of issues, and lags far behind some of the advances being adopted in other states.

Lack of Mobility and Accessibility

Right of the bat, the site runs into issues with mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone. How ironic is it that there is a graphic in the site header of a woman looking into a mobile device…

The iframes that occupy most of the real estate on the new site cause all sorts of problems with these devices, and the state should have explored other ways of displaying the information in these frames if it deemed it critical. Sadly, that is not the only issue caused by the use of iframes on the site.

When you use the site’s translation feature (located at the very bottom), you see that most of the content in these iframes resists translation to different languages, making it useless to non-English speakers. This problem is particularly acute because the non-translatable portions occupy such a large percentage of the real estate on the main page. What is the state trying to say here? Our social media content is so important we need to use the majority of our homepage to display it, but pay no mind if you speak Spanish?

Additionally, the site has some basic accessibility issues that can cause problems for people with disabilities. These issues are easy to fix, and its kind of embarassing that they were overlooked before the changes went live.

It’s troubling to see Delaware take steps backward in disability access and language translation on its official state web site.

Social Media or Propaganda

The social media content that is so prominently displayed on the main page is intrusive and crowds out much of the useful content. People use a state web site because they have a transaction they need to conduct, or information they need to find. There is a shockingly small amount of real estate devoted to things that typically bring most people to a government web site (and that’s the opinion of a social media fan).

In addition, all of the social media content that occupies the bulk of the site’s main page looks to be of the propaganda variety. Most of it looks to be recycled RSS feeds from agencies. (Note to other governments that may be watching, this is how not to do engagement via social networking.)

Show me the Data!

When I look at the new Texas and California web sites, here’s what I like. Both have ample links to their social media directories, but they don’t shove it down your throat like Delaware does - implicit recognition that people typically come to a government web site because they have a problem or need to conduct a transaction with government.

In addition, both have prominently displayed links to their government data catalogs. Both Texas and California recognize that a central element of Gov 2.0 websites is data.

It’s somewhat alarming to see Delaware falling so far behind this trend that is being embraced in so many other parts of the country. A lot of effort and time went into the redesign of the delaware.gov site and not a single open data set is to be found anywhere.

Sad.