Design State: A weblog about government web design

Doesn’t exist¹. About a year ago, I was working site for a regional terrorism early warning group; naturally, one of the items they wanted on their site was the National Threat Advisory provided by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I figured that it wouldn’t be that hard to find information on the DHS site about how I could get the threat advisory on the site I was working on. This was not the case. Nowhere on the DHS site is there an indication about how one might go about putting the Threat Advisory on a site of their own. My emails to the DHS staff went unanswered.

What I ended up doing was just grabbing the current Threat Advisory image and posting it on the website I was working on. I didn’t have a set of images to switch in case the advisory changed, if it had changed I would have just copied the new one onto the site. So far I haven’t had to worry about it, because I don’t think the threat advisory has changed for a few years. Even if the threat advisory has become somewhat of a joke, having the DHS appear to think of it as a joke as well (considering that there is no real effective way of knowing what the threat advisory is on a day to day basis apart from visiting the DHS site) is pretty counterproductive.

Here’s how the National Threat Advisory could be made more useful across the board:

1. Create a badge like the ones provided by Flickr, or AddThis!, which allow users to grab content from other sites to display on their own page. The DHS main page even has an AddThis! plugin in case you want to share it with Digg, MySpace, Facebook or Yahoo Buzz. Which is cool, I guess. What would be cooler: a DHS-managed National Threat Advisory badge that security groups or whomever can embed directly into their pages and one that will update in real time as the threat advisory changes.

   The benefit of this should be obvious; as soon as the threat level changes, this information is disseminated across all of the state, regional and local government security agencies that have sprung up since the DHS was formed. Instant communication, with a minimum of effort. They’ve already got RSS feeds, why not a Threat Advisory Badge?

2. If figuring out how to program a badge is too difficult, the DHS could at least provide a downloadable set of Threat Advisory images that could be used by the kind of site I was working on and the opportunity to sign-up for email notification if the threat level changes. The email subscription page states “Selected pages throughout DHS.gov feature an “E-mail me when this page is updated” button. Clicking on that button will allow you to subscribe to updates for that particular page.” The Threat Advisory page doesn’t have one.
3. Make the Threat Advisory more accessible. Instead of having one image serve for the entire threat advisory, it would be quite easy to replicate the entire thing, colors and all, with CSS. On the bright side, at least the advisory image has good alt text.

In the end, the lack of a National Threat Advisory Feed is just a small failure of customer service. The prevailing sentiment of the 2.0 web is “give it to me” not “I’ll go get it”, and the fact that I couldn’t even contact an actual human at the DHS to talk about this issue shows a distinct lack of understanding of the needs of one of their most involved groups of stakeholders; the government departments and agencies that get DHS funding and do their best to help make America a more secure place.

Although National Terror Alert, a “private homeland security blog … not affiliated with any government agency” already has a Terror Alert Badge available, its unaffiliated, unofficial status would make me leery of putting it on a government web page. That feed is featured on over 50,000 web pages though, so it was definitely a niche that needed filling.
The DHS hasn’t missed its window yet.

¹ In an official capacity.