Every day, hundreds of thousands visit the NASA web site seeking information about the agency, our missions and programs, and we’ve been getting feedback that they’re liking what they’re seeing. Recently NASA.gov received the highest customer-satisfaction rating of any government web site. NASA.gov also was included in a map of the most far-reaching web sites. And just today we received the statuette representing our third Webby award.
That’s gratifying of course, but what does it mean besides a chance to blow our own horn? Mainly it’s validation that what we do here works for you, the Web public. We take your feedback seriously and rigorously incorporate it into our efforts to improve the site.
To find out what the site’s users think of it, and most importantly if they’re finding what they’re looking for, we get feedback through multiple sources: e-mail to the site, traffic statistics showing what content people are interested in, and a customer-satisfaction survey. We use this information to prototype new features, which we then test with representative users before releasing it. Our goal is to constantly improve our site and make it consistently one of the best on the Internet.
The latest customer-satisfaction data says we’re headed in the right direction. Starting in 2001, we had a rating of 73. More recently we have rated a 79 in 2007, 80 in 2008, and 82 in 2009 and most recently as high as 84. In plain English, NASA’s web site is closer to industry leading websites like Google.com (an 86 in 2009) or Amazon.com (also an 86) in customer satisfaction ratings than it is to other web sites both inside the federal government (74) and in the private sector (72).
With continual growth in daily visitors to our site, increasingly high ratings of customer satisfaction, and additional recognition of our efforts to communicate effectively online, we are proud to be ranked among the best websites on the Internet. Earlier this year, Google released what it considers the top 1,000 web sites in the world by website traffic and NASA made the list. And, on Aug. 25, NMap released a poster of favicons, or small icons used by your web browser to represent a website, scaled to size based upon Alexa traffic rankings. NASA again made this ranking and was within the top-third of the rankings of the top 3,000 sites online.
This year’s People’s Choice Webby Award in the Government category was our second in a row and third overall. Earning recognition as a Webby winner is a tremendous accomplishment, one we humbly accept. With nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 states and 60 countries around the world, the 14th Annual Webby awards was the largest competition in the award’s history.
With all of these rankings, ratings and awards, we believe that the public is finding NASA.gov to be an authoritative source for the latest science, technology and mission-related news from the agency. We continually strive to improve and serve our site’s visitors in new and innovative ways. Our teams of web editors, multimedia producers and technical specialists meet at least weekly to discuss ways to enhance NASA’s online experience.
With more than 50 staff located across the country and internationally, we are always on call and always posting the latest news from NASA. We are always listening to feedback, planning for the long term, analyzing what it will take to get the word out and rolling out enhancements to the NASA site.
In the next few weeks, look for a new presentation of news stories on the home page, a revamped version of the mobile site and online streaming of NASA TV in HD. And remember your feedback is always welcome.
Congratulations, NASA, on your ratings, rankings, and awards. I am not surprised about any of it. NASA is THE BEST at public interaction online and offline.
Nasa.gov doesn’t have to WORK to be the best, as the title of the blog post says, it already IS the best! I agree with Sheryl that I am not surprised at all of the awards and recognition. Nasa.gov just keeps coming up with better and more cool and interactive features. It makes all that NASA does interesting and exciting to outsiders and people who may not be extremely interested in space exploration and NASA (as I am!). As Sheryl also said, NASA’s public interaction goes well beyond just the web site, such as NASA-TV, the easy availability of NASA-TV streaming on the Internet, NASA’s public speakers, etc. Please keep up the good work at getting the information out.
Thanks
I am happy for the interessting of people for nasa/univers, but I am also afraid because is also a danger, no?
I am piku.And i live in a third world country named Bangladesh. I have so much atracktion about space and satelitte.As per reason i am a great fan of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). I persionaly very happy to khow that NASA has started a widely spreaded and hiest customer satisfaction ratingful website.So best of luck NASA and also for ur new website.
Thanks to you from China.
Congratulations NASA! Especially keeping in mind traffic of this site generally has much more quality of content. Your site could be even more good-looking in case you implement automated comment syntax premoderation, asking user for comments note correction or running so on its/his own. It has not to be mandatory… Nobody might be offended cause of new buttons into the form, having or not spellcheck nearby (Word SW or any)… You’ve got the rules. So as the language. Keep flying, men!
Hi,congratulation ,you all deserve the best.on NASA site there are a lot of great,amazing websites about astrophysics with a lot of beautiful pics ,that update ,overall when i look for something about physics i find lots of interactives,pics,websites.But when i look for something that concerns aerospace,I don’t find much,in other words i find but the same websites every time ,there are only a few great,complete websites concerns aerospace and most of them are with old theme,I hope people in NASA pay attention to this , too.Thanks.
Great post. That is a very cool graphic and great eye for catching the NASA logo! Keep up the great work in making the NASA.gov portal admired by many around the world…
Dear NASA.
I think the title of this post is a bit ironic. Why? Because NASA.gov does NOT work. I still need to type in WWW to get to the site. My suggestion is to have your webmaster solve that problem, which will take only seconds. People don’t expect to need to type WWW anymore.
Nice site and post.
Thanks.
Rob
NASA has been exceptional in the service to humanity & their activities are bound to bring a lot of good in the years to come. Thank you from the heart.