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.

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.

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.

Honey, I shrunk the web

August 2009: 13.5 million fewer hostnames than previous month

In August 2009, according to Netcraft’s monthly web server survey, the internet shrank – there were around 13.5 million less hostnames than July 2009.

Netcraft, who conducted the server survey, suggested that much of the drop was due to the expiry of a large number of sites at The Planet, including 5 million sites in the .pl top-level domain all on one IP address, which were believed to be part of a linkfarm. [Wikipedia's definition of a linkfarm]

Usable form design?

Why aren’t we talking seriously about usable form design?

Forms, forms, forms.
All I seem to be doing these days is filling in forms.
And it isn’t easy.

I’m a form-dill. When I need to fill in a paper form, I always take two copies – because I usually stuff up the first one. I don’t think I am alone in this.