What should a website look like? This? Or this? How about this? C’mon, click on them.

I call these the Cat’s Breakfast, the Dockers-Wearing Throwback, and the So Cool I Can’t Stand It approaches to web design. They all work well for what they’re trying to do. There’s no one right approach to web design, any more than there’s one right approach to music or anything else.

Within a given domain, say “eyeglasses,” each corporate entry reflects a particular gestalt for the offering company. You’re going to get one type of design and imagery from J. Press and something quite different at American Eagle Outfitters.

Within a given corporate entity, though, most organizations work hard at having a consistent look across divisions or brands. We live in the age of branding.

Now the General Services Administration, through its fabled 18F group, is making a fresh attempt at bringing order to federal website design so that federal sites have consistency.  Last September, 18F  published a draft design standard. Now the 18F blog is showing how one coder-designer named Andrew Miller has applied the standard to propose a new look for the CIA. As Miller puts it, the CIA isn’t the worst federal site.

Sites I nominate for revision include the FCC and the FBI. But the point is that federal site design is all over the place. If you compare FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the main Justice Department site, you could hardly tell they’re the same department.

The federal government got onto the web early. Since the advent of the Netscape browser, the government, like most business, has launched successive waves of web site and pages. From the earliest meetings of the Federal Webmasters Forum to the work of 18F, individuals and agencies have tried to bring order to the haphazard collection of federal sites.

Too many federal sites feel dated or present a confusing face. More importantly, federal sites are often hard to navigate and inconsistent in navigation from agency to agency. Federal sites aren’t worse on the whole than average. But now they have a better-than-even chance of improvement if the design standards take hold.

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