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State of New Hampshire
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State of NHSITE OF THE WEEK

To the victor goes the web site. Whether you are the President or the Governor, the official news is always in your favor. NH's state site has lots of data if you dig deep and lots of gubernatorial PR if you don't. Too bad some of the best material (formerly WEBSTER) seems to be missing.

 

VISIT the official State of NH web site

THE NUTS & BOLTS

It’s good to be the king. While President George Bush worked on damage control all week regarding his military record, the economy and the war on Iraq, his official web site made it all look like business as usual. When I checked midweek, the official White House web site homepage included no less than four photographs of the president in action and three photos of Jim Wilkinson, Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications. There was no hint that the ship of state was traveling through heavy seas.

Here in the Granite State, Governor Craig Benson had his own fish to fry. New Hampshire’s highest paid state employee, computer guru Bob Anderson, recently quit his $150,000 job to modernize the state’s computer system and save taxpayers $11 million. This week legislators were wondering aloud where the saved millions had gone and whether they had been duped. Before becoming a public servant, Anderson had worked for Cabletron, a local high-tech firm under its President, COO and CEO, Craig Benson. Neither had ever worked in government until Benson took over as governor last year.

"I find government to be a frustrating process," Anderson said when he quit, according to an Associated Press report.

But New Hampshire’s official web site NH.gov does not reflect bad news, focusing instead on the sunny side of life. In fact, critics of the new improved NH web portal have suggested that Benson treats the "dot-gov" domain as if it stands for "governor" rather than "government". The governor’s movie-star smile is featured prominently on the home page.

Clicking on the governor’s portrait leads readers to no less than two dozen large photos of "The Governor in Action" – meeting with veterans, greeting the elderly, talking to school kids. We see him signing proclamations, meting the winner of the "Lunch with the Governor contest", posing with mounted state police officers, and stumping for a laser recreation of the fallen Old Man of the Mountains. The "About Craig" section offers a complete Cabletron resume and voters are urged to "Contact Craig" or click on "Craig’s Photos". It is all extremely chummy.

I didn’t have the same experience when shaking hands with the governor a few months ago at the grand opening of a local hotel. We were introduced. I repeated my name. The governor repeated "Nice to see you," and was gone before we could make eye contact. I’ve been told he may attend a speech I’m giving during the summer. Maybe we can try again.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

On the surface, I find NH.gov pretty appealing. The homepage is easy to take in and the page is dominated by a pretty picture that changes with each visit – a flower, Portsmouth tugboats, a stream, a beaver in a birch tree, a frog, a pine tree, a spider web. One gets the feeling that the whole state is just one natural paradise. Makes me want to sing "New Hampshire, Naturally" by the Shaw Brothers.

Others may criticize Bush and Benson for running the government like a corporation, but online, that is not a bad thing. Government web sites can be deadly dull and New Hampshire needed a little public relations pizzazz online. You don’t have to do good to look good, I always say.

Under Governor Jeanne Shaheen, the site had a more, well, businesslike look. In the past, the state left the pretty stuff up to our official tourism site, VisitNH.gov, an engaging and informative web site targeted to out-of-state visitors. Now it’s hard to tell the government from the scenery.

The left side navigation of the homepage has miraculously compressed the essence of the state into just nine buttons. These lead to submenus, sub-submenus, and in some cases to sub-sub-submenus. Such "tree" menus can be confusing if you don’t think like the webmaster, but there is a pretty nifty search engine attached that works well. I searched on "moose plates" and found the data quickly. Search on "state flag" for the proposed legislation to change the state symbol from the tall ship Raleigh into the former Old Man of the Mountains. Type in "lottery" and you get the NH Sweepstakes Commission. But search for Bob or Robert Anderson, the former Technology guru, and you get a poem by Robert Frost instead. No bad news, remember, is allowed. This is a happy, efficient state that runs like a top.

A number of NH departments and agencies have their own web sites, and NH.gov acts as an effective gateway to find them. The meaty governmental stuff can be found in the menu on the right hand site of the homepage wrapped around the picture of the governor. Links into the executive, judicial, and legislative branches are here, as well as excellent access to the resources of the state libraries. This part of the site used to be called WEBSTER, a witty pun on the Web and Daniel Webster. I used to use that section a lot in research, but it seems to have been assimilated into the updated state site. I would tell you why and how, but I couldn’t figure out what button to push to ask questions of the webmaster.

THE UP SHOT

All six New England states have official web sites exactly where you’d expect to find them – RI, VT, NH, MA, ME and CT-dot-gov. That makes it easy to offer first impression comparisons, and first impressions do count.

Half of the state sites, for example, offer no image of their governor on the homepage. In Connecticut, you have to drill down through three layers to find out who he is. Massachusetts offers a tiny image of Gov. Nit Romney. Click on Gov. Baldacci on the official Maine site and you can see him walking his dog and drinking a cup of coffee.

Creating a web homepage forces an organization to prioritize. What a huge organization chooses to place in its upper menu tier tells a lot. The trick with a government web site, is that it must be all things to all people. Bureaucracy and red tape are harder to disguise online, and since the web is highly interactive, important issues tend to swim to the surface and affect the graphic user interface (GUI). The more government uses the web to solve its problems and connect with people, the more the design has to accommodate.

Maine, for example, has chosen to put a plethora of links right on the homepage. Massachusetts has gone with an extremely flat governmental look, about as exciting as a tax form. Rhode Island looks even duller, with a strip of postage stamp photos marching across the top of the page. The Connecticut site has an online newspaper look with lots of graphic tiles to highlight sections of the site. Vermont, like its buddy New Hampshire, has opted for the sharper tourist appeal with not too many buttons and plenty of pretty images.

Just about everyone has a "kids" section. They recognize that we learn about government while in school, then we complain about it as adults. Kids are the ones who tour the capitols, those impressive cavernous buildings with the shiny domes and rotundas filled with statues and flags. They stare at the glitzy stuff, poke their heads into the legislative chambers and get their pictures taken with the governor. In that way government is a lot like a web site – pretty on the outside, confusing on the inside. It’s accessible, dynamic, representative, interactive, full of data – but most people never get beyond the pictures on the homepage.