A seventh annual report on online state and federal e-gov features has ranked the General Services Administration’s FirstGov.gov portal, the Department of Agriculture’s homepage and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website as the best performers for 2006.
The report, published by Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy, used an analysis of 1,564 state and federal sites, rating them on contact information, publications, databases, portals, and number of online services — taking individual agencies as the unit of analysis.
Coming in at fourth was the Department of Commerce, followed by the Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, Postal Service, Department of Education, Social Security Administration, and Department of State.
The report found that just one percent of government sites are accessible through handheld electronic devices, that the number of government sites with a visible security policy posted rose slightly to 63 percent this year, and that 64 percent of government sites are written at the 12th grade level, even though the average American reads at a far lower level.
