The digital government paradox
Traditional government websites—with overly aesthetic designs and weak content structures—are now obsolete in the age of artificial intelligence. As digital becomes essential to government service delivery, the public sector must confront this cultural and operational shift now, not later.
I say this after 15 years working on government websites, from developing a widely used goverment WordPress theme to co-founding a software-as-a-service company that supports municipalities with web hosting and content management tools.
I’ve seen the good, bad, and baffling in government websites. I’ve had countless conversations with government leaders about digital strategy. After asking my advice, I’ve been told “we’re going to do it the other way” only to hear later that “we should have done it that way.”
What once felt unimaginable—redefining what a website is—now seems inevitable.
Goodbye, aesthetic-first bureaucracy
Too many governments treat their websites as visual exercises. Content is secondary. API, AI and other access points are afterthoughts.
Sites are often organized around agency structures (yes, still), filled with on-brand design elements— like embellished hero units and carousels—and built to adapt to devices more than user needs.
Design systems like the U.S. Web Design System and the California Design System still matter. But simplicity and elegance—not visual flair—must be the default.
Redefining digital roles
Public sector design must shift from graphic-heavy to content- and data-driven.
Talent priorities must move from visual design to content design, data modeling, technical writing, and user research.
Content designers must understand structured, machine-readable data. Technical writers and subject matter experts must translate policy into plain language. Information architects must simplify complexity into usable content.
Teams must adopt autodidactic mindsets and apply learning quickly to their work and culture. Training—whether via online classes, YouTube, GPT prompts, or vendor demos—must be encouraged, even required.
Everyone—governments and vendors alike—must become service designers.
In this process, cross-functional teams will finally emerge, breaking down silos between digital, communications, policy, and leadership.
Build on content, not aesthetics
The new model for government websites is content-first and structure-deep: modular, reusable blocks of information managed at a single source of truth.
Content must syndicate across platforms, both public and commercial.
Visual design must take cues from developer documentation—scannable, hierarchical, and task-focused.
This content-forward approach will better solve persistent accessibility and performance issues.
The CMS overhaul
WYSIWYG editors and PDF-centric workflows must be phased out. CMS tools must enforce structured content types and design standards.
Governance must become critical. Version control, approvals, and automated compliance must make policy and service information faster and easier to publish.
Leading through change
Civil servants and elected officials must become AI-informed leaders. They now have a real chance to deliver public services at speed and scale—and must act on it.
Resistance is inevitable, even from digital and civic tech advocates, but we can no longer be naive, precious, or rigid about what’s needed.
A mandate for simplicity and service
To deliver great digital public services, governments must invest in function over form: clean, text-based interfaces, structured content, and AI-powered tools to help users find, understand, and access services.
We must evolve beyond outdated ideas of what a government website should look like. The future is radically simple, powered by data, extensible, and run by new talent with new skills.
Government websites, as we know them, are dead. Long live government websites.
