The subject of the MA legislature’s new website has arisen in the comments, but, this being a blog and all, I thought it was worth its own post. The old legislative website was kind of goofy – 1990s-era web design, and the content was weak at best. But it did have some useful stuff, and everything that it had was reasonably easy to find, since they just kept adding links on the front page when they put something else on.
Now, there’s a new website with a new look, and drop-down menus – oooh! Web 2.0! Spiffy. But as far as I can tell, the content is no better than it used to be, and perhaps worse. For example, there’s still no indication that things like roll calls will be posted online in anything resembling a timely fashion, and to search them, you still have to know the roll call number, rendering the search function virtually worthless. And you still have to be a legislative specialist to make heads or tails of the bill history feature.
Your thoughts? What’s good about the new site, and what did they get wrong in the redesign?
The Statutes are much worse, harder to read and lousy print outs. The old website did this better.
Maybe I need to give this a rest, but Secretary candidate Jim Henderson made me away of the many shortcomings of data available. Public records are not online that should be and are in other states.
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p>From my own bloggy world, I have been long frustrated by the SOC’s attitude that:
And so it goes. The commonwealth’s public records are closed to the public. You need to ask or beg or pay, and only when they say you can.
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p>It appears that the SOC runs this like a for-profit consulting firm. That’s just not right.
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p>So, the new website may not only be poorly designed, it can’t offer data that the SOC won’t provide the public. Moreover, where’s the ability to search databases that would not violate personnel or privacy regulations? Not there.
…the Secretary of the Commonwealth is responsible for the design and content of the General Court website.
The real complaint of many is lack of content. Far too much of the content is behind walls and inaccessible to ordinary humans. If you don’t have meaningful content, the prettiest UI is meaningless.
I was only commenting on the previous commenter’s apparent suggestion that the Secretary was responsible.
You don’t suppose any patronage was involved in the design and implementation of the new site, do you? Are we to believe that there is such a paucity of web designers and implementers in Massachusetts that there is nobody who could have done a better job? Does anyone know who built this site and how the team was selected?
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p>First of all, it fails the most basic test of any website — validation by the w3C Markup Validation Service:
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p>The above quote understates the results of actually running the validation, I invite any of you to try it yourself. Follow the link to the validator, enter the domain name (“www.malegislature.gov”), and click “Check”. I can’t embed the long list of complaints in this comment.
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p>These are fundamental, basic errors — easy to test and easy to fix. No professional should release a site containing these errors (never mind that the site is built using a “transitional” DTD, when “strict” is today’s standard).
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p>These aren’t soft and squishy arguments about style, information content, or usability — this is published code that doesn’t conform to standards. It is the web equivalent of a contractor delivering work that violates basic building or electrical codes.
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p>If one of my teams put this forward to me as “ready to publish”, I’d take all of them to the woodshed and tell them that I don’t even want to see a site that doesn’t pass basic validation. If this was a site supplied by a vendor, I’d reject the invoice until the site passed this validation cleanly.
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p>Oh, and just a tiny nit. Am I the only one who finds the domain name — “malegislature” — a bit disconcerting? It can be “unpacked” a few different ways:
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p>In my view, this spanking new website is a microcosm of why our local government is so dysfunctional. We can, and should, do much better.
And I agree about the domain name. When I first saw it, it looked to me like “male legislature” and I thought: geez, they’re sure taking this good ‘ol boys club thing a bit far…
Most websites are designed under the “Does it look decent under the major web browsers? Fuck it that’s good enough” protocol rather than making any serious attempt to actually stand up to the W3C standards. Examples of this include http://www.bluemassgroup.com, http://www.massdems.org, or even http://www.google.com.
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p>This is a bad thing. In an ideal world, websites would be up to protocol so as to assure compatibility between different browsers. However, it is the status quo. And you cannot attribute corruption to a website which is flawed in a way which is every other major website on the Internet is flawed.
I didn’t pay taxes to publish http://www.bluemassgroup.com. It isn’t published under the auspices of any government.
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p>The complaints about google.com stem from its use of HTML5, which is still in the draft stage &8212; there is no “standard”, and the decision to use it is a business decision made by Google.
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p>I agree with your summary of the quality standard sought by most websites. That’s why so many websites don’t work, and is the source of an enormous amount of frustration for regular non-technical users.
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p>It is also true that, particularly in some more rural parts of America, buildings, plumbing systems and electrical systems are not up to code. It is also true that building collapses, plumbing failures, and fires are also far more frequent in those regions.
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p>I’d like to know the process through which this site was designed, the implementation team selected, and the result vetted before going live. Perhaps “corruption” is too strong. Nevertheless, this region is chock-full of developers and companies who would eagerly embrace an opportunity to do better than this.
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p>I’m weary of seeing a constant stream of mediocrity emerge from institutions that claim and used to demonstrate a tradition of excellence.
Are still designing in “XHTML 4.0 Transitional” is pretty lame. Though, note that both the Transitional and Strict specs came out at the same time. However it was largely to give developers time to learn/habitualize the new specs.
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p>If anything, things really should be done in 4.1…if you want to get technical.
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p>But really, even that is out of date, since you can DOCTYPE for HTML5 now with total backwards compatibility (even to the dreaded IE6). We’re still developing in XHTML at my company, but there’s really no reason to not switch DOCTYPE declarations at least (and we will be on our next projects). There’s even no reason to actually start coding in HTML5 on some things…you just have to use javascript to force most of the IE family (< IE9)to comply. (The drawback is that anyone running IE 6-8, and has JS shut off, the browser will ignore the new HTML5 tags.)
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p>The bigger deal IMHO than any web standards is, how does it conform to accessibility standards? Though granted, most of the XHTML/HTML5 markup IS helpful to accessibility – like the requirement to use ALT tags on images for vision-impaired users who have websites read out loud to them. THAT is a very big deal, since this is info that should be as accessible as possible to all types of users. If they failed to close their img tags with a space-/ at the end, but they used ALT tags, I’d prefer that really.
I will say that it’s better than it used to be.
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p>There used to be gaping holes in the content. A lot of those have been filled in, but certainly not all.
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p>Content-wise, my biggest gripe is that the old website had everything you could want to know about each year’s budget: the Ways and Means proposals, all the amendments that were filed and by whom, which amendments were adopted and in what form, etc. The details for each year’s budget were added in the clunky way that David describes, but at least they were there. Almost none of that information has been carried over to the new website.
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p>Also, it was very hard for me to find any email address to pass along the suggestions resulting from my beta-testing of the site. (It’s webmaster@malegislature.gov, and it’s under “Terms of Use,” not “Contact Us.”)
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p>Especially given the omissions in content, I have to say that I find the “Legislative Trivia” section really annoying, in the same way I find the paperclip man who wants to help me with Microsoft Word annoying. I really don’t care which two towns the Bridge of Flowers connects. Work on something important.
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p>Finally, I’m not sure where to file this observation, but as far as the “People” section goes, the old website used to provide straightforward lists of House Members and Senate Members. The new website has a new and separate section for “Leadership.” What’s the old saying – there are two kinds of people in the world – people who divide the world into two kinds of people and people who don’t?
you can now search an individual legislator’s list of sponsored and co-sponsored bills.
As a taxpayer who funded this I am disgusted.
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p>As Tom has mentioned quite nicely above, it does not even come close to meeting the basic requirements of a “current” website design.
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p>The search features are terrible, IMO. If you are not a policy junky then good luck finding anything without a bill #, roll call # or some other arcane piece of trivia.
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p>That they were actually able to make the budget section worse is an accomplishment.
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p>The Legislature and its members keep talking about transparency, but then they come out with this. This is embarrassing and if one of my vendors wanted me to pay for this they would be sent packing with a tirade of expletives.
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p>How about a website:
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p>- That meets basic design and compatibility standards
– That supports dynamic searching without needing to know arcane details
– That provides for meaningful and prompt updates along the lines of ALL roll call votes will be updated and posted within 24 hours of the roll call (heck I would go for 4 hours but let’s start with a day)
– That asks power and novice users what they want in a design rather than appearing to design the thing in a vacuum.
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p>So does anyone know how much we paid for this “upgrade” as it is a waste of our money?
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p>This does not have to be so hard. There are good websites and pieces of websites out there. Heck I frequent the OCPF website and it is easy to use, search, sort and download. Our public records on Beacon Hill should be so accessible.
The new feature to see all bills the representative has sponsored and co-sponsored is a great new resource
It looks like new design covering the same old content. It’s all dressed up, but for experienced users of the old website it makes it harder to find things.
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p>That said, it is the end of the legislative session. I reserve judgment until I see how the new website handles the flurry of activity at the beginning of the next session.
Good post on the Legislature’s website. The old one may not have been “pretty”, but you could get the information quickly and without much pain. The new site does just what the legislators would like — make it more difficult to access information quickly and completely.
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p>While the site provides more information about legislators; it hasn’t improved much of anything that wasn’t already on the old site. Ignoring the legislative trivia, what is truly “new” on the site? (Other than the new found “slow” speed or misdirected links.)
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p>It’s a shame. A workable site became not so workable. Good pick-up by BMG.