Style points for a politician’s site
What should a politician’s website look like? What features should it have?
After looking at quite a number of them, both good and bad, here’s my list of suggestions of the features it should have.
- Uncluttered look, strong colour, strong contrast
- Fully accessible design
- Large-scale eye-catching graphic front-page header with regular video feature
- Powerful right-hand navigation
- Large full navigation page-footer
- Blog-style news features on the front page
- Invitations to respond, easy-to-find sign-up to get news
- Full RSS sign-ups to the Press Room for Media Releases and the Newsroom blog items
- Twitter-feed displayed, with easy “follow me” invitation
- Short simple page-text, well-spaced dot-points and paragraph breaks.
- Key policy quotes in a large font-size prominently displayed on relevant pages
- All key public video coverage placed in YouTube, Yahoo and locally available
The above points seem simple enough, but are rarely all followed.
6,647 Australian Government websites
September 2009: Australian Government web traffic
Experian Hitwise tracks all the Government sites visited by Australians in a month. In September 2009, Australians visited 6,647 Government sites. Visits to Government sites contributed 1.98% to the total visits to all websites during September.
As you may imagine, 93.01% of those Government websites they visited are local rather than overseas Government sites.
What overseas Government websites attract Australian visitors?
In the Top 100 government sites they visited, the three most popular US Government sites were -
NASA – Astronomy Picture of the Day
NASA
Voice of America
What were the Top 10 Australian Government websites visited by Australians?
The following list shows the Top 10 Government sites, whether they are a State or Federal Government website and their percentage of visits out of visits to all Government websites during September.
Bureau of Meteorology (Fed) – 22.45%)
Centrelink (Fed) – 4.03%
Australian Taxation Office (Fed) – 2.43%
Australian JobSearch (Fed) – 2.18%
Roads and Traffic Authority, NSW (NSW) – 1.57%
NSW Lotteries (NSW) – 1.19%
Department of Immigration and Citizenship (Fed) – 1.06%
Transport Infoline 131500 (NSW) – 1.03%
CityRail (NSW) – 0.98%
TransLink Australia (QLD) – 0.90%
As can be seen, four of the highest traffic Australian Government websites are not Federal, but State: 4 New South Wales and one Queensland site make up the Top 10.
The Top 100 Australian Government websites
Out of the Top 100 government websites, as visited by Australians, how then do the different States traffic volumes compare with each other and with traffic to Federal government websites?
Including the three US Government websites mentioned above, there are 22 New South Wales Government websites, 13 Queensland Government sites, 12 Victorian sites, six Western Australia sites and three South Australian sites in the Top 100. The remaining 41 sites are Australian Federal Government websites.
The New South Wales sites are as follows. The list below shows their position in Top 100, along with their percentage of the traffic amongst all Government websites.
For example RTA is 5th, with 1.47% of the total traffic, City of Sydney is 100th, with 0.15% of the traffic.
5. Roads and Traffic Authority (1.47%)
6. NSW Lotteries (1.06%)
7. Transport Infoline 131500 (1.03%)
8. CityRail info (0.99%)
11. NSW Dept of Education (0.90%)
19. Board of Studies NSW (0.52%)
27. NSW Ministry of Transport (0.39%)
32. NSW Reg. of Births, Deaths & Marriages (0.35%)
37. Visit New South Wales (0.32%)
46. NSW Department of Health (0.27%)
51. NSW Public Schools (0.24%)
52. Dept of Environment (0.24%)
58. Sydney Buses (0.22%)
63. Lawlink NSW (0.21%)
67. NSW Police Online (0.20%)
69. Countrylink (0.19%)
85. Office of State Revenue NSW (0.16%)
86. OTEN – Open Training (0.16%)
92. NSW Office of Fair Trading (0.16%)
93. Govt of New South Wales (0.16%)
98. NSW Rural Fire Service (0.15%)
100. City of Sydney (0.15%)
NSW Government: Top 10 sites
September 2009 visitor figures for NSW Government websites
The Top 10 get 51.1% of all Australian traffic to NSW government-owned websites. That’s around 13.2 million visits.
The NSW Government owns and operates around 570 websites. These include agency and department prime websites, along with special-purpose and campaign websites.
The following are the Top 10, which attracted 51.1% of all Australian traffic in September 2009.
Roads and Traffic Authority, NSW (2,809,149 Australian visits)
NSW Lotteries (2,136,875 Australian visits)
Transport Infoline 131500 (1,841,674 Australian visits)
CityRail (1,750,787 Australian visits)
NSW Department of Education and Training (1,601,268 Australian visits)
Board of Studies NSW (813,313 Australian visits)
NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (634,115 Australian visits)
NSW Ministry of Transport (632,613 Australian visits)
Visit New South Wales (536,547 Australian visits)
NSW Department of Health (492,888 Australian visits)
These figures have been extrapolated from the Experian Hitwise category percentages, and known site visits using the Australian figures provided by Google Analytics on some of the sites in the list.
I have been careful to say “Australian visits” above, as the server logs may show many more visits, but we are measuring visits by Australians here, rather than their total worldwide visit numbers.
The Top 20 get 65.1% of all Australian visits, and the Top 50 get 81.8%. 83.12% of all that Australian traffic to NSW Govt sites comes from people who live in NSW. 6.11% of the traffic comes from Queenslanders, and 5.29% from Victorians.
