By Adam Nekola
Fiscal Note
Perhaps it’s a cliche in the internet world that government websites are poorly designed. With the controversial rollout of HeathCare.gov, the stereotype was only reinforced. Still, as we at FiscalNote pride ourselves for making state information more accessible, the quality of government websites is of great interest.
We already had some opinions on the best and worst state legislature websites. Our engineering team has gone through each of these sites to build data scrapers, familiarizing themselves with the state’s open data.
The public, however, isn’t concerned with structured data. To complement our data team’s opinions, we asked our policy intern to go through each and provide a usability score. To supplement his thoughts with quantitative data, we ran a web speed test on each site’s home page. This gave us three scores to inform the best and worst.
Note: Web speed tests are based on first page view, with no cached content.
For a detailed look into the web technologies used by legislative websites, compared to leading technology companies, download the white paper “The State Legislature Online Tech Landscape.”