Too Many Links!

I viewed the United States Patent and Trademark Office website and I started counting. The website http://www.uspto.gov/, is pretty straight forward but something got me. The landing page is a series of 142 links and one search bar at the top. That seemed a little odd. I was reminded of all of the crumby government websites that use to exist, and some that still do . Others have raised issue with some of these websites as well. So I wanted to do a simple study on government websites.

I began with a literature review of e-government. I looked for articles that had been published since 2008, as material before web 2.0 would be rather poor for comparisons (that way I am not wasting my time looking at p values for images on a website, type of studies).  I found an interesting model proposed in one such study, that you might not be able to read. In any case "User-centered E-Government in practice: A comprehensive model for measuring user satisfaction" by Pieter Verdegem and Gino Verleye provides for a way to measure the effectiveness of a government website. The found that "the indicator “reduce the administrative burden” received the highest average score of importance" (Verdegem, P. & Verleye, G. 2009) implying that those services would be of the highest benefit. They used 2006 data, so things could change but I believe that reducing administrative burden would still exist as a user want.

So I came up with a study idea to see if federal websites look as though they reduce the administrative burden. I felt burden would be excessive links. Why excsive links, google isn't fond of  a lot of links, Here is some opinion saying 6 to 7 links max, others note 100 is the limit. I felt that 100 was a good standard. 

I hypothesize that federal government websites are similar to the United States Patent and Trademark Office website and have an excessive number of links, i.e. over 100 links.

I went to a federal website clearinghouse and went through all of the websites alphabetically. Every 142 websites I would save that site to be viewed, providing some randomness. For the sake of time I only went with 3 rounds of random selection. So I went over the sites and reviewed the number of links that they were sporting today March 9, 2012. I also looked at how many email addresses they had. The resulting agencies are as follows:

• Economic Analysis, Bureau of;
• Committee for Purchase from People Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled; and 
• National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare

First up in the review Economic Analysis, Bureau of, or as the agency may otherwise be known as: Bureau of Economic Analysis. The landing page for this website has a total of 63 links, 0 email contacts, and one search bar.

Second is Committee for Purchase from People Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled. The landing page for this website has a total of 78 links, 2 email contacts and one search bar.

The final website was the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. he landing page for this website has a total of 13 links, 3 email contacts, and no search bar.

So my hypothesis was wrong, at least based on this rather limited study. I don't feel like doing fancy math at the moment but none of the three had above 100 links. Is the United States Patent and Trademark Office website above and beyond link wise? To be continued...

Sources in order of use:
http://www.uspto.gov/
http://www.dublintown.org/
http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/government/info-management/225402205?pgno=6
Verdegem, P., & Verleye, G. (2009). User-centered E-Government in practice: A comprehensive model for measuring user satisfaction.Government Information Quarterly, 26 (3), 487-497.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
http://asitethatworks.com/how-many-main-navigation-links-should-a-website-have/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
http://www.usa.gov/directory/federal/index.shtml
http://www.bea.gov/
http://www.abilityone.gov/
http://rs9.loc.gov/medicare/index.html