The evolution of US state government home pages from 1997 to 2002

We examined the home pages of the 50 US states over the years 1997–2002 to discover the dimensions underlying people’s perceptions of state government home pages, to observe how those dimensions have changed over the years, to identify different types of state home pages, and to see how these types have changed. We found that three primary dimensions explain the variation in perceptions of home pages. These are the layout of the page, its navigation support, and its information density. Over the years, variation in navigation support declined and variation in information density increased. We discovered that four types of state government home page have existed continuously from 1997 to 2001. These are the ‘Long List of Text Links’, the ‘Simple Rectangle’, the ‘Short L’, and the ‘High Density/Long L’. To this taxonomy, two other page types can be added: the ‘Portal’ page and the ‘Boxes’ page. The taxonomy we have identified allows for a better understanding of the design of US state home pages, and may generalize to other categories of home pages. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.