How To Deal With Crappy Government Web Sites

Governments across the world have never quite grasped this thing called internet. This is absolutely not a U.S.-only thing. With government web sites, there are only two kinds. Ones that are well thought out and easy to use, and ones that are so unbelievably horrible you instantly feel your tax dollars have been completely wasted.

I have seen government web sites that are so bad that I’m amazed they even exist. I routinely see web forms that don’t work, documents that are an uncomfortable mix of text, DOCs and PDFs (there’s almost no standardization whatsoever,) no continuity between areas (everything looks vastly different where you have to re-learn each section,) broken databases, etc. You name it, I’ve seen it, and you probably have as well.

These are my tips for navigating the crappy government web sites you may encounter.

1. Use Internet Explorer only.

Government web sites are designed like corporate intranets, which of course are designed for IE and nothing else. If you use Firefox or Opera, the chances of the site not loading correctly and/or failing are high. In addition, many web forms simply will not work.

2. When using forms, use Notepad to copy/paste into it.

Even for the better government sites, you absolutely cannot trust their web forms. You’ll spend 5 to 30 minutes typing up something, hit the submit button, then the form fails. This will make you want to punch a hole in the wall each time this happens because you’ll have to type up your stuff all over again.

The solution is to use good old Windows Notepad. Launch Notepad by clicking Start/Run, type notepad and click OK. This brings up the plain text Notepad editor. Type up whatever you need to in there for the web form. After that, copy (DO NOT cut) and paste into the form, then submit. If it fails – which it might – you’ve got a backup of what you just wrote, so you can try again if need be.

3. You may need to disable browser protection when using a government site.

Ironically, most government web sites have security so unbelievably weak that the antivirus/anti-malware suite you use may not allow you to use the site at all.

Know how to temporarily disable your protection suite if you run into issues where the suite prompts "unsafe" browsing.

4. Learn how to increase text size at whim.

For whatever ridiculous reason there are many government sites that have ultra-tiny text in them, as if they were programmed for an 800×600 resolution. Fortunately all web browser have the ability to increase/decrease text size easily.

All you have to remember is the keystrokes. CTRL and the plus key will increase size. CTRL and the minus key decreases. To reset to default size, it’s CTRL and the 0 (zero) key.

5. Bookmarking may not work, learn the use of web archives and/or PDF Creator.

There’s a piece of information in a government web site you need. After looking for a good long time, you finally find it. Hooray! So you bookmark it because of course you’ll reference to it later. But there’s a problem. Once you close the browser and reopen it, then click the bookmark – it doesn’t work because the page is session based. Once you end the session by closing the browser, you have to navigate thru the site all over again just to get back where you were – and that will take a long time because you had to click thru 12 to 20 links just to get there in the first place.

The solution to this is to save a local copy.

In Internet Explorer this is easy. Click File/Save As, and choose to save as a "Web Archive." Save the file to your desktop or My Documents folder for easy retrieval.

In the instances where the web archive doesn’t work correctly, you can alternatively save your own PDF using PDF Creator. What this software does is install a virtual print driver that allows you to "print" a web page to PDF.

Say you have a web page you want to export to PDF and have PDF Creator installed. Click File/Print in the web browser and choose PDF Creator. You’ll see this:

Click OK. Then you’ll see this:

Click Save at bottom right, then save your PDF document. It’s that simple.

The PDF saved may not look exactly like the web page did, but it’s better than nothing.

Use PDF Creator when saving a Web Archive via IE’s File/Save As doesn’t work for whatever reason.

6. Know who to call for instructions.

When all else fails, you can call your local government office for assistance – however there’s a trick to this.

Before calling, be in front of your computer. Then when you get somebody on the phone and listen to their instructions, follow along with them. If you encounter an error, tell them right there because it may be something wrong with the web site on their side they can fix immediately.

Do not be afraid to report site problems, because if you don’t, chances are nobody else will and the whole system fails because the administrators of the site will simply assume everything works fine.