Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm announced the launch of an new state Web site aimed at encouraging young people to explore careers in the manufacturing industry. The Web site, http://www.michigan.gov/mfgcareers, targets a 12- to 24-year-old audience by featuring techno music, Flash animation, a virtual tour of a General Motors plant, interviews with teens and the state of Michigan’s first blog. Complete Article on MiBizWest.com >>

Don’t look.

Don’t type in that URL…

You know you aren’t going to like it....

Sometimes I should listen to my gut.  This is one of those times.  But when I saw the phrase “The State of Michigan’s first blog” while reading the press release linked to above, I just had to go see.

My gut was right.  Now I’m lamenting the spending of my tax dollars on a site frought with design and usablility issues.

First...we have a Flash intro.  How quaint.  How 1998.  How inaccessible (no options offered for hearing or visually impaired users).

Then the main page loads.  Oh, where to start....here’s a “5 minute review” in no particular order:

• The site design is broken in Firefox, with white gaps showing where there shouldn’t be.
• The page title only says “Manufacturing Careers” - with no indication of what site you’re on.
• The home page has music (where does the state think it’s target audience will be using the site?  I’m guessing school labs where music isn’t appropriate).
• The home page HTML doesn’t validate.
• The home page CSS doesn’t validate.
• The home page doesn’t pass a Section 508 check.
• The main navigation is a mix of links to other websites that open in new windows and links to other pages in this site.
• The main navigation changes as you move around the site - the current page disappears from the menu and something else fills its place.

And the blog?  Frankly, it’s just weird.

It’s called “Your Blog” yet has two authors in the characters of Tye and Justine.  According to the site:

“This is an opportunity for you to share your thoughts on careers or ask questions. Maybe we can help!”

It isn’t so much a blog as a Q&A...there are no posts organized by date, no categories, no permalinks, no trackbacks, no date-related archives, and no RSS feed.  In short the only blog-like characteristic is the ability to leave comments (and the existing comments look suspiciously as fake as the authors identities).

The whole site is “trying so hard to be cool” that it completely misses.  The site contains just about everything that older folks think appeals to teens - music, animation, Flash...but the site designers would do well to read up on Jacob Nielsen’s Teenagers on the Web report, summarized in this Alertbox article:

Many people think teens are technowizards who surf the Web with abandon. It’s also commonly assumed that the best way to appeal to teens is to load up on heavy, glitzy, blinking graphics.

Our study refuted these stereotypes. Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them. We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users in our latest broad test of a wide range of websites. (The success rate indicates the proportion of times users were able to complete a representative and perfectly feasible task on the target site. Thus, anything less than 100 percent represents a design failure and lost business for the site.)

Teens’ poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level.

We did confirm that teens like cool-looking graphics and that they pay more attention to a website’s visual appearance than adult users do. Still, the sites that our teen users rated the highest for subjective satisfaction were sites with a relatively modest, clean design. They typically marked down overly glitzy sites as too difficult to use. Teenagers like to do stuff on the Web, and dislike sites that are slow or that look fancy but behave clumsily.

The irony here?  The State of Michigan is desperately trying to attract young tech workers - one of the reasons behind Governor Granholm’s “Cool Cities” effort:

Cool Cities Michigan Main Street Vision Statement
Cool Cities Michigan Main Street desires Michigan’s downtowns, big and small, to revitalize and to grow into thriving traditional centers of commerce for people and business. These healthy and vibrant downtowns and neighborhood centers are part of a larger strategy to retain and attract young people, professionals and high tech companies to the State of Michigan.

This newest site is either meant to be Exhibit A for just how bad Michigan needs young technical professionals, or is the latest black-eye in the State of Michgan’s online presence.