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Visualize better government

Sidebar | Five steps to a better Web site

1. Get user feedback. Paula Spilman, information technology project manager for the Army Accessions Command and the Army’s virtual recruiting tool, Sgt. Star, advises feds who are looking to build a better Web site to “talk to the users, all of the users. In our case, it will be educators, recruiters, parents and the kids themselves. Make sure you get something from everyone and have something for everyone on the site.” For example, Sgt. Star holds more appeal for people ages 17 to 24 than for older users. Parents and educators aren’t as interested in him, so the GoArmy.com site retained the traditional methods of Web navigation.

2. Don’t change your site all the time. “If you have a government Web site that is highly used, your regular users are probably going to be disappointed,” said Andrew Novick, the National Institute of Standards and Technology engineer who maintains the Time.gov Web site.

3. Answer all your e-mails. “We’re government, we’re civil servants,” Novick said. “We should help people wherever we can.”

4. Define and document your Web site’s audience, as well as user goals, top tasks, the agency’s top needs, and the site’s required features and functionality. Do all this before touching any design work, said Sanjay Koyani, director of Web communications at the Food and Drug Administration.

5. Provide strong content that is easy to read, scan and print. “Content is king,” Koyani said. “It’s why people come to our site. We must continually employ good-writing-for-the-Web principles so that the public can easily scan our information and understand how it will help them do something or get informed for a better quality of life.”

— Trudy Walsh