Giraffe Forum

Good complexity leads to greater convenience, choice and options. Bad complexity leads to frustration, wasted time and wasted money.
Dimitris is a small business owner in Greece. According to a TIME article, he estimates he has paid “about a fifth of his revenue in bribes — to tax collectors, health inspectors, police and other officials”. Small […]

Low-value content is destroying the usefulness of intranets and public websites. It needs to be stored separately.
Andrew Leung is a computer science researcher at the University of California. His team analyzed a large data/content environment over a three month period. Their findings included the following:

More than 90 percent of the files were never accessed.
Of those […]

Because of the Web we are putting less and less trust in experts and organizations and more and more in people like us-our peers.
The European Union’s Lisbon Treaty was recently defeated in Ireland. One of the most remarkable things about the defeat was that practically every major organization was for it. Every major political party […]

Get politicians off government websites
Shouldn’t there be a law against having politicians’ pictures on websites, particularly on homepages? Taxpayer money pays for these websites. So what gives politicians the right to take taxpayer money and hijack government websites and turn them into campaign websites?
If you look at the homepage of North Korean websites then you […]

E-government is not about technology. It is about saving time and making life easier and more efficient for citizens and business.
Get away from a technology obsession
Letting the IT department manage the website is like letting a printer manage a publishing house. This might have been okay in 1998, but in 2008 a government web […]

Web government is about helping citizens and businesses make easier, faster, better-informed decisions.
More and more government websites are unmanageable. The sheer size and number of websites are vastly greater than the human resources available to manage them. Recently, I spoke to a government agency that has a total of 600 employees. It has 100 […]

The Web offers one of the most significant opportunities to communicators in modern history, but requires a total redefinition of what communications is.
Traditional communications is one-way, passive and past-tense. It is all about telling people what you have done, what you are doing, or what you are about to do. There is a core belief […]

Never tell people what you’re going to do for them on the Web. Just let them do what they came to do as quickly and simply as possible.
“Welcome to our website.” What? I’m in a hurry. I don’t want to pass meaningless pleasantries with your website. I don’t want to shake its hand. Or talk […]

Government websites are organization-centric, complicated and confusing, according to a survey of government web professionals in the United States, New Zealand and Canada.
Between August and October 2007, over 230 government web professionals in the United States, New Zealand and Canada rated their websites based on a list of phrases. There were 22; 11 positive (customer […]

Government websites must specialise and deliver better services to specific audiences, not try to be everything to everybody.
A number of years ago, I did some work with a department of education. It was reviewing its web strategy and had come to a decision. In its new version, it would not have content for students. The […]