Discussion of industries with particularly bad websites always piques my interest, so when my morning research brought me to an article titled The Ultimate Ugly Showcase of Current Government Websites I jumped right on it. Turns out the article isn’t all that current, being from November 2009, but I was intrigued nonetheless.
The article provides screenshots of the homepage from a variety of countries’ sites and offers some simple commentary. Most of the comments revolve around general accessibility, use of garish banners in the site’s head, and the presence of useful tools like RSS feeds. The author doesn’t seem to have been terribly impressed and, given the number of countries with sites in the article, had little good to say about government sites in general. The reviews ranged from sites that were listed as totally nonfunctional to those that were tagged as “butt ugly”.
Reading through the list I initially connected the author’s comments to my personal thesis about what happens when designers serve an industry where they don’t believe they face real competition. Of course, I’m basing this on my experience with websites used by independent advisors and securities representatives. In my industry, the general difficulty in approaching new technology and the artificial barriers to quality have seriously retarded progress and led to a prevalence of badly outdated web presence. Given that not too many folks will switch nationality based on web presence, I started to assume I was looking at a similar situation. However, when I took a deeper look at the screenshots of the sites in the list, I wasn’t seeing what I expected. These sites weren’t really that bad, especially given that many of them represented countries with a poorly developed internet economy in the first place.
It is common for me to see small financial firms without any web presence at all. While some of the government sites were inaccessible it was most likely due to poorly designed country level firewalls or censorship software. It probably doesn’t always apply given the way countries use their provided domains, but I certainly didn’t see the sort of domain parking pages I’m used to. Only the Solomon Island’s Drupal site seemed clearly broken, which isn’t really all that odd to see in a Drupal site anyway. Many of the sites listed were fairly out of date, but not as badly as the article seems to suggest. Few of them were using cutting edge technology or even contemporary design techniques, but none appeared greater than 5 years from current. Those with reference to badly out of date web browsers were sometimes in countries where newer browsers are restricted due to their encryption technology. (Which says something badabout the country all by itself.) Sites designed for monitors with extremely low resolution were mostly in countries with such low standards of living that I’m surprised anybody there has a monitor at all. Spot-checking many of the sites, including USA.gov and the incomplete one from the Solomon Islands, most of them had seen updates in the last year. America’s site is actually pretty nice now that they’ve dropped the split menu and the composite header graphic. Most sites seem to have stepped up to the plate on the more egregious failures and started to deliver a news feed.
The more I looked, the less I agreed with the author. Compared to the average site run by Rep/Advisors of independent broker dealers, or often the broker dealers themselves, these weren’t bad at all.
