ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

Congress' Best (And Worst) Committee Web Sites

House Education and Labor Committee Tops Poll, Dead Last For Senate Armed Services. Experts Say More Coordination Is Needed.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

The Senate Armed Services Committee's site, with its bold italic font and dull background, is the worst of the group.

Updated at 11:13 a.m. on Nov. 30.

Barack Obama punched his ticket to the White House with the help of innovative digital campaigning, and since arriving he's overhauled and created high-profile Web sites like WhiteHouse.gov and Recovery.gov. Yet amidst this push for transparency, some Congressional committee Web sites -- crucial for disseminating hearing schedules, transcripts and legislation -- haven't caught up.

The Web sites of House and Senate committees have little coordination with each other, and they're as varied in quality as the issues they tackle. Visit the House Education and Labor Committee and you get a sleek Web site with a legislative calendar, embedded videos, a blog, recent markups and RSS feeds. Then swing by the Senate Finance Committee site for information on health care and you find a link to the 2,074 page bill, a link to the Democratic Policy Committee and not much else. A sidebar helpfully notes that the site is optimized for Netscape Navigator, a now-defunct Web browser.

The Congressional Management Foundation awards Gold Mouse prizes every few years to the best Web sites maintained by committees and individual congressmen, but its next report isn't due until January 2010. Given the uneven landscape of offerings, NationalJournal.com commissioned a panel of new media experts to grade 16 Senate and 20 House committee Web sites and offer their criticisms and suggestions. The judges reviewed standing committee Web sites only and did not look at joint or select committees.

The reviewers were:

• Sheila Campbell, co-chair of the Federal Web Managers Council and manager of the Government Web Best Practices team at the General Services Administration

• Mark Drapeau, co-chair of the next year's Gov 2.0 Expo and an adjunct professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University

• John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation

The panelists graded committee Web sites for design and content on an ascending scale of 1-10. Sites were ranked based on the average combined scores, out of a possible 20 points.

House committee sites fared better in our review, scoring an average of 12.7 total points, compared to 11.8 total points for Senate sites. The top-rated sites featured legislative calendars, effective use of YouTube and social media, FAQ pages, up-to-date committee news and crisp, clean homepage designs. Some of the lowest-rated sites recalled Leo Tolstoy's quote that each unhappy family is "unhappy in its own way."

The Senate Armed Services Committee's site, with its bold, italic font and dull background is "circa 1995," Wonderlich complained. The Senate Finance site, Drapeau noted, "crashed my Firefox twice. So I guess this one is the least useful."

The criticism didn't surprise some of the lowest-graded committees. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was poised to boast the lowest-ranked Web site until it relaunched an overhauled page Tuesday afternoon. A new site was long overdue, admitted Frederick Jones, communications director for the committee, last week.

"Everybody hates it, and it's not user-friendly, and it sucks," Jones said of the old page, which Wonderlich called a "truly ugly Web site."

At the end of the day, Campbell argued that instead of committees reinventing the wheel on their own, they ought to be sharing successful design and content strategies.

"It will be a more efficient way to manage the sites and will be a better, more consistent experience for constituents," she said.