In the good old days (around 1995), choosing a display resolution for a website was easy. Everyone had 640×480 monitors, so that’s what we designed for. By 1998 it was a little harder – many, but not all, people had upgraded to 800×600 screens. So if you wanted to target early adopters you could aim…
A theme I often hear in Australian web design circles is “make the website less crowded”. It’s accepted wisdom that a website should have plenty of white space, clearly separated parts – and as little text as possible – particularly on the homepage. Similar to Google’s 28 word limit, Australian communicators seem to consider the…
The Investments blog posted a thought-provoking post a few days ago, asking Should Government Websites Be Allowed to Post Google Ads to Offset Deficient Budgets? This was based on a question put to ‘Father of the internet’ and Google head evangelist, Vinton Cerf, who was asked at an eGovernment seminar, “if he thought that there…
I was reading a very interesting blog post the other day regarding the experiences of someone who is colourblind, Confessions of a colourblind man. It raised a number of accessibility issues with printed material, moving images and websites that the author had experienced during their life. Despite the requirement for government in Australia to ensure…
There’s a great article up on BuzzMachine titled Google as the new press room. It makes the point that newspapers are in the content business, not the printing and distribution or website business. As such they should focus on what they do well (create excellent content) and outsource the non-core activities. The specific example is…
One of the biggest issues I’ve seen in government websites is excessive use of words. Government agencies often treat each website page as a stand-alone fact sheet. This means they err on the side on completeness, leading to wordiness. Most of us have seen the research. People don’t read wordy, jargon-filled pages – they skim….
I have a very strong view on who owns a government agency’s website – it’s operated by the agency on behalf of the public. The teams who look after the code, functionality, design and content are custodians and gatekeepers who ensure that the website; works (is online 24/7) meets all required standards uses appropriate current…
An interesting article was released in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology earlier this year discussing a view that government should focus on providing usable data online rather than full-blown websites. Titled Government Data and the Invisible Hand , the premise was quite simply explained in the abstract: Rather than struggling, as it currently…
In Australia website usability is important, but accessibility is law. While most government agencies are extremely diligent about meeting accessibility requirements it is also important to look at the accessibility of any online tools they use that affect their customers or clients. For example, my agency uses a third-party email marketing system, Vision6 for electronic…
CAPTCHA is a security technology for websites that works by making users verify they are a human by typing in a random string of letters or numbers displayed in an image. You could consider it a Turing test for humans. It is now widely used as it is easy to implement and has a reasonably…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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