The New New York Senate Website – Grade: C

This morning the New York Senate unveiled their new website at an event held online, in NYC and in the Albany. I watched the entire event online from my home in NYC and I’d like to provide my thoughts and a review of the site. First let me say that it’s great to see our government beginning to think about technology and how it can help to improve the conversation between elected officials and the parties they represent. It seems like across the world more officials understand and are using technology more than ever before and that can only lead to more efficient use of funds for projects. With that said, let’s get to the review.

First, I don’t want my elected officials pissing away their time on Twitter. It’s cute that Senator Malcolm A. Smith sat on the side of today’s event and wrote several messages on Twitter. I’d rather see each senator have a forum or question and answer section where comments can be posted in public and the replies would also be public. When I look at the profiles of the Senators who have Twitter accounts listed, most haven’t even participated. If I ask Senator Smith (or anyone else) a question on Twitter, how do they other millions of NYS residents learn about my question, the answer, etc. With a public forum on the NYS Senate website, an answer is more likely to be forthcoming and the general public can discuss the issues as well. The same could be said for Facebook – it’s just not needed or necessary for this purpose. I’d be ok with a #nyssenate search feed made available on the website.

I like the RSS feed idea – my suggestion would be to add a way to get the updates via email as not everyone knows what RSS is or how to use it.

The biggest issue I have with the site is that what looks like thousands of links are broken. Here’s a search for NYS Senate using Google:

It appears nearly every link that was a part of the old NY Senate site is broken and takes the user to a not found page. I am shocked that they would put the site out without any 301 redirects in place.

The site is using Drupal which is an open-source CMS framework and I am ok with that selection. What I am not ok with is the usage of YouTube as the default video service. I’d like to better understand how the decision was made to use YouTube over any of the other video sharing services (e.g. NY-based Vimeo, NY-based Blip, Viddler, Brightcove, NY-based FeedRoom, etc.). I was against the choice when President Obama used YouTube for his weekly addresses and I am against it here as well.

Lastly, the site has a number of usability issues:

• When I visited the site for the first time, I clicked on the welcome message from Senator Smith. This took me to a page within his section of the site. Frankly I thought that the entire site was for Senator Smith – it took me quite a bit to figure out how to get “out” of his section and once I did I realized what the issue is. The navigation and site look is identical when you are inside a senator’s section and when you are on the main site. I’d like to see a hierachy for navigation so that users aren’t confused.
• The “find a senator” search only works when a full address is entered – ZIP only returns no results and the page makes you believe you have no state senator

Overall I think the website is a good first draft. It looks like it was created by developers for developers and once they make some modifications, I think the site will be ready for primetime.