Four Cool WP .gov Sites

Asides

I was in Washington DC last week at the OpenGovDC conference where I participated on a panel about design. The organizers and many of the speakers were pretty Drupal-focused, but I did get to meet some folks and learn about the ever-growing use of WordPress inside the Beltway. Here are four:

  1. CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is the best-looking of the four, and 100% WordPress.
  2. MO.gov, Missouri State. Is there a LESS.gov? 😉 The show-me state has a solid WP-as-CMS going here.
  3. Office of Compliance. As exciting as it sounds.
  4. NCCS.gov, National Center for Computational Sciences. Website is okay, but center is super-cool: they provide super-computing (tens of thousands of processors) for open scientific research.

Any other favorites? Particularly well-designed ones like consumerfinance.gov.

21 thoughts on “Four Cool WP .gov Sites”

  6. I’m shocked that they exist! Most gov sites are drupal, drupal, drupal, and until now the only “government” sites I saw sporting WordPress were campaign sites (which was sad IMHO as they looked a lot better than the Drupal ones, especially on mobile).

    Is there a way to add these to the “Showcase” section of WP.org? Perhaps it may help convince a few officials to make the switch! 🙂

    Reply

      1. Currently it is :
        Popular Tags
        * CMS (151)
        * People (95)
        * Business (69)
        * etc
        It will be really great and *useful*
        if Gov is added just after CMS or People since we all are under some sort of a Gov.
        Popular Tags
        * CMS (151)
        * Gov (53)
        * People (95)
        * Business (69)
        * etc

      2. It’s ordered by number of sites, so we just need more government sites in the showcase for it to show up.

  10. What’s the best way to tell if a site is WordPress? I usually just try to type /wp-admin at the end of the URL but that doesn’t always work 😛

    Reply

    1. I usually view source and look for references to wp-content, or add /feed and see the generator statement. I feel like there’s a Chrome extension that does it too.

      Reply

      1. Actually there are two: Chrome Sniffer and Wappalyzer(beta)

        When I’m not sure, I do the same: view source and look for wp-content…
        But most of the time I just guess… simple by the site look, the links structure and the permalinks 😉 … And sometimes I know it’s WP even from SERP :)) it’s easy to spot the permalink year/month/day/postname 😉

  12. I love how the office of compliance is talking about the use of space heaters on the first day of summer! Go government!

    Reply

  14. love the new wordpress.com/cities.

    Municipalities can save SOOOO much wasted money by switching to WordPress and maintaining a site there.

    Not to mention it will actually improve usability by 1,000% (that’s not an official number – but I bet it’s close), and make finding essential government information much easier.

    I just wrote an article about it on WPMU.org: http://wpmu.org/wordpress-cities-the-new-government-web-standard/

    I really like what ben balter (http://ben.balter.com/) has to say about open source in government, and hope he can help make a change from the inside out.

    I really hope this catches on.

    Reply

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