EIGHT GRIPES ABOUT GOVT WEBSITES

Nearly every town, city, county and all the states have websites. We turn to them with regular frequency for a variety of purposes, which we’ll delve into right now. But there are any number of downsides to many websites and that’s what we really want to write about today.

Among the benefits that websites can bring to a governmental entity are:

The ability to allow residents to electronically interact with their government for tasks like renewing licenses, paying taxes or requesting public records. This can make for a speedier experience for people while saving governments cash.

They can be useful repositories of budgets, meeting minutes and policy documents. In prior years, people were kept in the cold when it comes to information like this. Now, on well-run websites, transparency is the name of the game.

They can be extremely useful in times of natural disasters or public health crises. The capacity to alter information in real time means that warnings about impending tornados, for example, can be removed when (one hopes) the danger passes.

Using infographics, superior websites can help explain complex topics in visual ways that can, done properly, help people understand what their governments are doing.

All that said, since barely a day passes when we’re not visiting a government website, we’ve accumulated a bunch of grievances. Here are eight that are on the top of our list:

1)    Where are the names? When we visit a website, we crave the capacity to be able to find the appropriate contact person to dig a little deeper into items that are unclear to us. But in recent years, even the names of department heads are hard to find.

2)    Where are the dates? Many websites put up a series of posts over the course of time. But it’s surprising how many of them don’t have a date attached.  It’s frustrating not to be able to clearly discern whether the news on a site came from yesterday, last month, or sometime in the distant past.

3)    Even though we are experienced website users, searching for what we want can be tough. We find that many government websites suffer from non-intuitive and outdated navigation decisions, as well as poor website and page design and layout. Chalk this up to a lack of attention, and shortages of both money and staff.

4)    We continue to worry about the digital divide between individuals who are comfortable communicating by text or email and those who still rely on phones. Yet on many websites, there’s a complete absence of telephone contact information, leaving people who still rely on voice in the lurch.

5)    The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that websites be accessible to people with vision problems, difficulties with keyboards, even color blindness (which can make it impossible to read multi-hued pie charts.)  According to CivicPulse research in March 2025, “Accessibility policy adoption is low, especially among small communities. 29% of officials from large communities (over 50,000 residents), 28% from mid-sized communities (10,000-50,000 residents), and 18% from small communities (less than 10,000 residents) reported having established accessibility policies for digital platforms.”

6)    You might think that this would be a top priority on the list of government website fixes, but CivicPulse also noted that “Only 13% of local officials said they feel very familiar with a Department of Justice (DOJ) update that requires local and state websites to become Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant, while 38% said they are unaware of the decision altogether.”

7)      Hyperlinks are often not updated. Since URLs change with some frequency, it’s important for websites that use hyperlinks to be sure that they actually link to someplace other than an error message. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center article, about a fifth of government webpages contain at least one broken link.

8)    Websites require a lot of effort to keep current. But a lack of resources can mean that they aren’t updated nearly as frequently as they should be. We believe that most people visit government websites to find out what’s happening now -- not how to get tickets to an event the previous fall.

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