The stamp of being ‘Government’ on government websites: Why government websites need an overhaul?

At a time when ‘Digitization’ has been given the highest possible importance and awareness is being increased among the citizens about its benefits and how it can transform the society at large, the shape of the government websites is only disappointing.

Here is a deeper analysis of how typical government websites look giving them that unfriendly ‘stamp’ and image that we most of the times link with the governments.  I have taken the websites of the government of J&K as reference points but my observation is that it is similar across governments.  To put it in other way, ‘it is cutting across the party lines’.

Some of the common issues with websites of government departments are listed below:-

Updated information:  I am sure when the proposals for creating websites would have been put up by the respective departments for necessary approvals and counter-approvals with various officials in the hierarchy; one of the benefits that must have been highlighted is that citizens would get the updated information.  Unfortunately, most of the websites do not carry updated information.

The most hit section is ‘Who’s who?’  Many a times, one would find the names of ministers, senior bureaucrats and officials out-dated and it is very likely that the minister and/or official must have ceased to be so. But on the website, they would continue.  I had come across two such recent instances.  One on the website of Directorate of School Education, Kashmir, the message from Director Section reads a one from the previous director.  Below is the snapshot.

Similarly, till recently, Srinagar Municipality website was showing the previous Commissioner’s name as the incumbent.  Unfortunately, when I tried to pull up the capture today, the website is down.  This leads to another issue…

Maintenance: Maintaining a website is essential.  But, then there are certain protocols to be followed.  Apparently it seems that the Srinagar Municipal Corporation’s website is under maintenance.  But during the broad day light!  Come on, most of such maintenance happen during a specific maintenance window.  Typically early hours of the day 2am to 4am.  Here is how the SMC website looked like at 1pm of the day.  Now this error could mean anything.  Giving them the benefit of doubt, I consider it being under maintenance.

Usability and Friendliness:  Apart from the information being made available through websites, one of the benefits that IT enablement offers is the usability of the data in a friendly manner.  Below are the notification areas of three government websites.  These are nothing but laundry lists.  Where is the benefit coming from IT?  Typically, a user would want a search and index utility to help fetch records based on some filtering criteria. But, ouch!

Just imagine the agony one has to go through for looking a specific notification.  One has to just go through each and everything to find out the particular notice.

While the General Administration Department website, gives some metadata but there are not utilities for one to filter and scan through a particular order.  There isn’t even a simple search box.

The second reference is of Directorate of School Education, Kashmir.  Here you just find notifications sorted by dates.  No further friendliness.

The scene gets further ugly on inspecting the website of J&K Public Services Commission.  You can’t even find them ordered by date.  It is just a simple bulleted list.

One could simply make a business opportunity out of these websites. To charge some nominal amount at CSCs and other such centres for finding out the particular notification for a person.

Aesthetics 

Webspace has its own aesthetics.  Although, nothing as such is defined even by W3 Consortium standards, but there are certain conventions followed by the developers while designing a website.

Unfortunately, the developers of these government websites either aren’t aware of it or lack even such basic skills to implement.

Some of the conventions applied are:-

* Following a definite style for titles and hyperlinks and differentiating the hierarchy by changing font sizes, etc.

* Using ‘soothing’ and web optimised colors

* Designing things proportionately on the webpage.

Now, lets have a look again at some of the government websites, starting with the Raj Bhawan website.

See the logo of the J&K government in the left panel.  It’s too large and at the same time the links in the top menu are too small to be visible. I will not go into designing and other elements of the website, but, here want to highlight only these two elements.  These only make the website uglier.

Here is the case of J&K Institute of Management and Public Administration, a premiere training institute for bureaucrats and officers.  I don’t understand why the government need to really make objects move, typically marquee to give a feel that the websites are dynamic. Come on. That’s not the definition of a dynamic website.  It only makes the appearance ugly.

Just visit the IMPA website (http://jkimpa.nic.in) and you will see notifications moving left and right, much in line with the perception about government where you have to run from table to table to look for your papers.  Same experience you will have here.  You have to run after a link with the cursor to catch hold of the notification.

Then we have the website of J&K Finance department. Here everything is ‘NEW’.  It looks like if ants and worms are marching on the screen.  Below is the screenshot and you can have a real time experience by visiting http://jakfinance.nic.in.

Then we have the website of Anantnag District.  No cohesiveness among the style of links.  First I thought, the links are generated by some tool like Wordle (http://wordle.com) where the size is determined by the density of a keyword.  Perhaps, the web administrators wanted to highlight the September Floods the most, hence its bold and big and everything.  Thanks to Digital India week, there is some eye candy on this website.

Another classic case is footer on the J&K High court website which reads that the website is optimized for java enabled Netscape 4.0 or above.  Now, this can only make one laugh. Netscape browser has stopped its releases and support in 2008. Not sure, how are people going to get it to access the optimized version of J&K High court’s website.

Finally, colours are something that is not given even an iota of consideration while designing these websites. While, going through the above screenshots, I am sure you must have disliked several combinations, but here is the J&K Vigilance organisation’s website with a pathetic background. Its grey colour does not good but just prompts you to shut the website in a flash.  Perhaps, the colour goes with the impression that there is something ‘grey’ about this department as corruption is rampant and on a high in the state administration irrespective of the political dispensation.

These are just of the examples to highlight and the list goes on…   Apart from this the issue is about these websites being not optimized to mobile browsing. They look only ugly on the mobiles if accessed and many features are incompatible when accessed through a mobile browser.  More so, none of the websites conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 as laid by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to improve the usability and accessibility of websites.

One can only say that development of such websites only shows non-seriousness of governments towards creating e-assets and making them really enabling for the citizens.  Other than this it also shows the lack of technical expertise with the government decision makers who approve such shoddy works.  These websites are even not good to be kept in museums as they fail to amuse any person.

It can only be inferred that the government websites don’t have any vision or strategy that they are aspiring for.  They are just there because somebody wanted to create a website.  What purpose it would serve; there is no serious thought given.

In my continuing article to this, I will put down some remedial measures that the governments need to take to really create valuable e-assets where IT can be seen as an enabler and transforming agent.  Then only we can see the benefits of digital revolution of a national – Digital India.