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.

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%)

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.

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]

Following is a summary of the size of the internet, month by month to date in 2009, according to Netcraft’s survey.

January 2009
185,497,213 sites. A monthly loss of 1.23 million sites.

February 2009
215,675,903 sites. A monthly gain of more than 30 million sites.

March 2009
224,749,695 sites. A monthly gain of more than 9 million sites.

April 2009
231,510,169 sites. A monthly gain of more than 6 million sites

May 2009
235,890,526 sites. A monthly gain of more than 4.3 million sites.

June 2009
238,027,855 sites. A monthly gain of more than 2.1 million sites

July 2009
239,611,111 sites, A monthly gain of more than 1.5 million sites.

August 2009
225,950,957 sites. A monthly loss of 13.7 million sites.

Netcraft provide these great monthly surveys of the numbers of web servers on the internet. In my view, it is the closest we can come to understanding the size and growth of the internet.

Disclaimer: Netcraft is a respected authority on the market share of web servers, operating systems, hosting providers and ISPs on the internet. I have no association with them.

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.

Most web-forms are also still pretty ordinary.
It is hard to make good forms. I hope we will see more research devoted to improving form design.

Many studies show that between 60% and 75% of all online shopping carts are abandoned before the completion of purchase. The reasons vary as to why it is so high, but I’m willing to propose that a good deal of it is due to poor form design.

More on this in a later post.

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.

Some of the best ideas since the last downturn and the dot-com bubble, do not yet have viable business models yet, but they are predicting that in 2009-10, the “gift economy” may deliver us some our greatest new web innovations.

From the same premise – expect the less well socially-adapted “EduPunks” – educated talented people out of work – to do some very high-profile, criminal and possibly spectacular web-hacks in the coming 12 months.

Smart people with time on their hands can be scary.

NSW Government websites: What are people looking for?

According to Hitwise, in the month of August 2009, web-users typed 61,249 things into Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines, and selected a NSW Government website from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) as the most likely site to provide an answer to their query.

Based on those 61,249 search terms, the top 20 search terms made up 18.72% of that total.

The top 50 was 24.97%, the top 100 – 30.17%, the top 1000 – 47.91%.

What were the top 20 enquiries that brought visitors to a NSW Government website?

Here are the top 20 enquiries -

rta

cityrail

nsw lotteries

board of studies

rta nsw

131500

city rail

cityrail timetable

sydney buses

rta test

countrylink

train timetable

taronga zoo

oten

lotto

city rail timetable

bos

births deaths and marriages

myrta.com

energy australia

Trains, roads and cars top the list

Grouping these top 20 enquiries by the purpose of the search and adding their volumes together reveals the following:

Public Transport (timetables) – 7.1%

Cars (Licenses, fines) – 6.0%

Education (student/teacher/parent information-seeking) – 2.33%

Did I win the lottery? – 2.19%

Births, Deaths, Marriages (Birth Certificates, etc) – 0.35%

Energy Australia – paying bills – 0.32%

When can I see the baby elephant at the Zoo? (Taronga Park enquiries) – 0.43%

How many NSW Government websites are there?

Currently, there are around 526 websites that are owned and operated by NSW government agencies.

Like most websites, search brings the largest numbers of visitors.

Here are the top ten NSW Government websites in August 2009.

They match the search traffic volumes above.

1. Roads and Traffic Authority, NSW  (10.57%)

2. NSW Lotteries (7.95%)

3. Transport Infoline 131500 (6.69%)

4. CityRail (6.61%)

5. NSW Department of Education and Training (5.81%)

6. Board of Studies NSW (2.86%)

7. NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (2.50%)

8. NSW Ministry of Transport (2.18%)

9. NSW Department of Health (1.96%)

10. NSW Public Schools  (1.79%)