Nextgov

Nextgov wrote a few weeks back about the best and worst of government websites. Now, one more organization has jumped on the improvement bandwagon: the Federal Judiciary, home of the U.S. Courts, launched on May 15 a redesigned website complete with additional tech tools and a whole new look.

As far as websites go, the cream of the crop are those with simple, yet elegant designs, Web 2.0 tools and easy-to-use templates, but there are a surprising number of government agencies that don't pay much attention to those details. uscourts.gov now includes email subscriptions, links to YouTube videos, news widgets, read-aloud for the visually impaired and audio downloads. The navigation is pretty smooth, and information is easy to find.

According to the announcement about the site's launch, the Federal Judiciary sought feedback from usability testing and focus groups to nail down the design.