If you live in the UK, you will probably find yourself on a .gov.uk website on a fairly regular basis. How do other governments do in maintaining websites? Some, like the US & Canada, seem pretty good because I have occasionally used them for things myself (either grabbing statistics or, in the case of Canada, finding French translations for obscure phrases which my dictionary has never heard of!).
But what about developing and less developed economies? China and India seem to do a fairly good job at it but the African states generally don’t.
India were in the British news this week for launching a disability portal and I think it’s important to countries who have a developing economy but millions of Internet users to provide information on the Internet as this will encourage more people to get connected which will aid education and consequently commerce.
The portal is remarkably well designed and there isn’t a shortage of skilled web designers in India! Whilst the site looks quite cluttered, it’s definitely easy enough to use and nicely uses JavaScript (very Web 2.0!) and PHP. A screenshot is below:
The site, as you can see, uses lots of multimedia and I do question whether that’s appropriate for a country where fast internet is hard to find. Also, why on Earth is the website in English?! Whilst I realise India has many languages, I’d think Hindi would be more useful for most of the audience!
Zimbabwean governmental websites are a much sadder tale. Below is this official website for Zimbabwe:
Lets start listing faults:
- Animated GIFs
- Pixelated Images
- Word art
- Frames
- Tables
- Textured backgrounds
- Horrible colours
- A hit counter (and my site gets more visitors than their government… how humbling)
Even though most citizens of Zimbabwe will lack Internet access, due to their ‘economy’, I think when you’re wanting to introduce your glorious country to the World, you should at least make your site nice to look at. Why does a country which hates England so much have their whole website in English?
Do you think a country’s website/their government’s website are a good indication of how modern a country is?
Tags: zimbabwe, web design, bad web design, india
Haha lol Joe, thanks for the plug
Actually our government makes quite horrible websites. They are usually in Marathi (for our state) and nobody who has access to the internet here knows Marathi. Our websites also keep getting hacked and have irritating marquees and crappy GIFs and of course theyre slow. Useless most of the time. But I don’t blame the govt. they shouldnt be putting any money into making their websites pretty just yet, they have bigger problems than that to focus on
[The website you mentioned for disability is of course an exception. Thats doesn't look like a GOV site which is made by the Indian Gov's Web Dept. though I can't say for sure of course]
The richer a country is, the richer its government and so the more money it will have to spend on providing information, so there is that dimension. But there is also attitude – a government (or a company, or person for that matter) could have all the money in the world, yet if they treat their website as a one-way thing and ignore their audience then it’s probably going to be not very good. Having a good design is not just about money but also about having the will to be truly interactive.