News
Press Releases: Government to Citizen
August 16, 2006
FirstGov is First in Report’s Ratings
Washington D.C. - FirstGov.gov, the U.S. government’s official Web portal, has been named the top-ranked federal website in Brown University’s 7th annual report on State and Federal E-Government in the United States, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced today.
FirstGov.gov was praised for being "clear, organized and user-friendly," and for displaying a "stunning" number of online services for citizens, businesses, federal employees and governments. "We can tell that the government is willing to speak to and help its citizens, which is one telling reason why the FirstGov portal is ranked as the number one site for the year," the report said.
The report, published since 2000 by Brown’s Taubman Center for Public Policy, analyzed 1,503 state and 51 federal sites, ranking them on features such as online publications, databases, audio and video clips, foreign languages or translation, disability access, privacy and security policy, digital signatures, PDA accessibility, readability and the number of online services.
"This report is a testament to all the hard work that the FirstGov.gov team and the GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications have done in making FirstGov.gov a world-class site," said GSA Administrator Lurita Doan. "I urge all citizens to log on to FirstGov.gov today and experience for themselves how easy it can be to find the helpful, official government information they need online."
FirstGov.gov is an integral part of USA Services, one of the Presidential E-Gov initiatives. USA Services delivers information and services to citizens through multiple channels. This includes the Internet, email, telephone, and publication distribution. Last year, USA Services reported 230 million public contacts, of which 8.6 million were through 1-800-FED-INFO (for telephone and e-mail), 8.2 million publications were distributed through the Federal Citizen Information Center (FCIC) in Pueblo, Colorado, and 179 million were FirstGov.gov. Citizens can access the Spanish language version of FirstGov at www.espanol.gov.
