Kudos to the State of Utah on their awesome web portal and for being recognized for excellence in web design and serving the population with an internet gateway that is complete awesome! The State was even recognized recently with a VEMA award for excellence – the VEMA Award recognizes outstanding work of the innovative, artistic, and creative professionals involved in the multimedia arts. See Utah.gov Wins Award for Excellence in Multimedia Arts and Creativity
From the get-go, when hitting the site you know that you’ve hit something special! The front page is informative, reactive, and yet not too over the top. The search functionality is front and center, giving the site a Bing-like look and feel. All the required navigation and info is found along a top ribbon including friendly drop-down navigation options.
Utah.gov
The main nav options are actually items that people need and want like employment links, social connect, and info for business and visitors. Some really friendly options include a settings tab where visitors can alter font settings and more. Social streams and feeds are easy to locate and there’s even a pointer to tools for developers – nice! The site is also location-aware and can serve relevant material to users who enable access to location information.
Overall the site is completely awesome and I also like the fact that there’s no big link to “GIS”, which I find to be completely useless and not of interest to most folks (whay do most Gov agency websites do this?? – GIS and map functionality is found throughout the site and supports all the various departments! Checkout the awesome Utah website