Unveiling The Secrets Behind Award-winning Government Websites

Investing in your website usually brings with it grief from citizens and commissioners. An excellent way to validate the value of your investment is to be win national website awards. Winning these awards proves you have spent taxpayer dollars wisely on a project that is being recognized for its successes. While there is no single secret to an award-winning website, here are a few tips that will help you get there.

An Eye-Catching Design Will Go a Long Way
Your website’s design must be clean and communicate its intended purpose. While an award-winning website does not have to be ground-breaking, a cutting edge design will grab the attention of the judges—if it’s done to improve the site visitor’s overall experience. Obviously you want your website to have a great design, but it should be done as to not divert attention from the overall usability of the site, such as oversized banners on interior pages.

When done properly, judges tend to view portal pages as an excellent way to filter users to specific areas of your website. The page must load quickly and provide menu options such as Departments, Government, Community, etc.; they should not use a just “Click Here to Enter” approach.

Content is King
With custom government websites content is usually the primary element being examined. No matter how great your graphic design is or how much interaction is offered, a failure in the content area will leave the entire site ineffective.

Excessive white space is detrimental in award review processes. Since every inch on a website is valuable real estate, unused white space is seen as a failure to effectively use the resources at hand. However, we must be careful not to “just fill in the blanks”, as this will lead to a cluttered appearance that distracts the user.

Navigating Your Way to an Award-Winning Website
Judges want to see a quality navigation structure that is consistent and effective. The navigation should provide the users with an intuitive mental model on how to find information. Your global navigation (or main navigation) should standout by using graphic buttons or identifiable text styles. Once a user has clicked on a specific menu item, that category should remain highlighted to ensure the user knows where they are within your website. If you are utilizing drop down menus, they should not run-off the page or have the bounce back feature that keeps them from running off the page. If your menus do run off the page, re-organizing your navigation structure so it can all fit on one screen.

Make Sure it Functions In All Environments
Good functionality in this instance has a broad range of meanings from ensuring your site loads quickly to making sure it works well in any browser. Your site needs to be functional for all users, in all circumstances. In a competition it could come down to you and another website and you don’t want the decision to be based on your website not displaying normally in Firefox.

Included in functionality your site must be Section 508 compatible. Make sure every non-text elements include a text equivalent Alt tag. To really wow the judges you can provide synchronize captions for all of audio and video files found on your website.

Interact With Your Audience
To impress the judges, and your target market, they should be able to constantly interact with your government website design. You can provide this constant interaction through interactive online forms, citizen request tracker systems, e-commerce options and e-mail notification systems. Using these methods to provide usable online services is always looked highly upon by the judges.

Even those with small budgets can achieve this functionality—or at least the appearance of it. Even though it is more time consuming and lacks the back-end system, with a few online forms you can receive citizen requests and then manually input the data. It’s the same with e-mail notifications. You place a form online requesting e-mail addresses, place the addresses in an Outlook group and then send your e-mails from there. Not only does this better serve your citizens, but it makes the judge happy too.

You want your website to seamlessly combine all of the criteria listed above. In most award programs, a failure in one of the categories we have discussed today will drastically decrease your overall score. Basically it comes down to how your website serves your citizens. The better you serve your citizens online, the more likely you are to win a government website award.

By: Cole Cheever

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Cole is currently the Public Relations Coordinator for CivicPlus, the leading authority on local and www.civicplus.com/>custom government websites, development and design. Working with more than 500 cities, counties, associations and school districts throughout North America, CivicPlus offers www.civicplus.com/egovernment-solutions>egovernment solutions that include consulting, design, hosting and more than 60 e-government tools all maintained by the CivicPlus Content Management System.