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.

Something for nothing

It’s better to do something for nothing than to do nothing

Both Chris Anderson (Wired) and Clay Shirky (NYU) have suggested that as web developers, smart web-people and journalists have been laid-off (“pink-slipped in 09″), they are creating a growing “cognitive surplus”.

This excess ability is actively engaging in web-labours of love for free, if only to do something valuable with their time and advertise their skills.