In October 2007, this blog described the clutter on the FCC website and compared it to other agencies.

Among the points made at the time nearly 3 years ago were the following:

1) Search engine.

2) Clutter, clutter everywhere. Apparently there is no self control at all on putting more information or more links on the FCC home page.

1. Too many links for the same document.
2. No other federal commission clutters its home page with individual commissioners's links.

3) Is anyone in charge here?

4) Difficulty of finding information without prior details.

5) Lack of links to specific FCC rules or statutes.

So what has happened since? Well, the search engine has improve a lot. It would be nice to order the results by date, but at least you get results now. At one point searches on “Kevin Martin” got only a handful of links, now searches work reasonably well.

The plot at the top of this page is from the original post and compares the clutter of various agencies’ websites. At the time, FCC had 260 links on its home page, more than any other agencies surveyed, and a total of 1188 words, putting it slightly behind Interior at 1233. But FCC was clearly the clutter leader in the NE corner of the plot!

So where does FCC stand today? While your blogger doesn’t have the patience to analyze the other agencies all over again - it is clear that no other agency has the FCC’s obsolescent cluttered design - today’s results for FCC are 259 links and 1105 words. So a net decrease of 1 link and 83 words. Positive movement in the right direction, but a long way to go!

FCC also remains the only commission is the federal government that clutters its homepage with individual links for each commissioner, not to mention a separate link for “All Commissioners & Press Photos”.