How do you tactfully point out a government site needs improvement.

E-Mail tact has never been my strong point.

[grelmar]

I wandered by my provincial electoral office's website to find out what riding I live in (the published maps are stunningly obscure), and found their website to be an even worse nightmare than the printed material.

A few key gaffs:

The front "splash" page redirects after about 3 seconds to their default IE site, without bothering to do a simple browser detection string. The splash page has a link to their site for "netscape and other borwsers", but I had to relaod the page a half dozen times to figure out where the link was, and click on it in time.

The IE site and the "Netscape and Other" versions are both framed sites. Icky in the extreme.

Freewheeling use of cheesy "blinky" gifs.

Massive chunks of the links lead to PDFs, without bothering to warn you in advance.

No real sense of any coherant information architecture.

And on and on and on.

I'm just getting really tired of seeing government sites, on any level, being this incredibly... bad. Anyone got any ideas on how to diploamtically aproach the problem?

[iamlost]

Diplomatically .... no.

From your description of the site it has been up for some years (at least I hope so ...) and when it was launched was likely pronounced "state of the art", "cutting edge", "public access for the new millenium", etc. And that is likely still how they think of it. If they even remember they have a site.

If you are very lucky you might be able to make a dent by proposing a remake to meet "todays accessibility standards" or "reduce bandwidth cost by utilising 'new' international markup/style recommendations" or some such.

If it was produced or is maintained in-house the person responsible will not be amused whatever you say, however you say it.

If all you want is to get it changed a well written letter-to-the-editor might well do the trick. Embarrassment is the best motivator of government.

If ... such a small word.

[Macro]

You either want to draw their attention to it, or you want to get it changed. If you want to just draw their attention to it call them and give them a few kind words of advice. If you want it changed...

Don't tell them. Get the site ridiculed in a news network/site/radioshow/magazine.

Or get it to be used in a text book example of how not to build a site.

Then point them to the article.

That's cruel but it's your best chance of getting it changed.