critiques

Reviews

335

News and Information?” The Department maximizes the cost to the public by providing many of its documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. While the documents may be full of good information, they require an external viewer. This user was able to download the viewer from a WWW site, but this requires extra work. Some people may not be allowed to put this program on their computers, if they are at work. Because of this limitation, the Department does not distribute its information equitably. To improve the page, documents should be offered in both HTML and PDF formats. The other major improvement needed is to implement the promised searchable database. This would help the user get around the ambiguous headings and go straight to the relevant information.

Depa~e~t of the Treasury WWW address: Ranking: Average The Department has some good information on its site, but certain problems make getting to the information difficult. First, the graphics on the many pages are numerous and extraneous, and offer little information. For example, on the top page, if the picture of the Treasury Building could be discarded, the size of the Secretary’s picture decreased, and the image map made smaller, then the page would load faster and look better. Many other pages have large graphics that offer little or no information. The headings, once found, are logical and make navigation through the site easier. One particularly useful feature is a “Short Cut to IRS Taxforms.” This is one of the few times the Treasury makes locating information easy to understand and acquire. The separate bureaus give information on their missions. Some, such as the Internal Revenue Service, are more complete than others. The Department of Treasury does not have any value-added information to the bureau links. In order to help the public locate information easily, they should add this. Finally, the Department does not maximize usefulness of the information in the site. In order to do this, they might consider implementing a searchable database or list of topics in their site. This would make the information on the WWW more valuable for the public, because it would be easier to retrieve.

Department of Veterans Affairs WWW address: Ranking: Excellent The Department satisfies nearly all the criteria listed at the top of this article. Since this department is traditionally a service organization, it makes sense that the information is easy to locate and current. The best example of how the Department maximizes the usefulness of the information is in the VA Benefits section. This describes exactly how to receive any of the listed benefits, who is eligible for the benefits, and what exactly the benefit is. The Benefits Manual is searchable by key word, which helps the public to locate information on the Department. Other sections in the site are searchable as well, showing the Veteran Affairs’ (VA) commitment to making sure the public can find relevant information. There is little the VA Department can do to improve this site. All the information is readily available and easily found. One suggestion would be to combine all the searchable sections of the current site into one large database that could be searched with one query. Other than this, the Department satisfies all the A-l 30 and other criteria listed.