NASA Updates WebsiteNASA Updates Website

NASA has made navigational updates its NASA.gov website, which recently made Google's list of top 1000 websites.

NASA, which has one of the most multimedia feature-rich sites of any federal agency, has made a series of user-interface improvements to its website to make it easier for people to use as well share media and information from it on Facebook and Twitter.

Updates NASA made to the site include adding images to a box on its homepage called "What are people interested in?" that shows the most popular topics on the site, and a streamlining of "Share" options on the top of each site page from a list of hundreds to four, which then expand if a user is interested into the full list.

NASA also added images to the pages and video it shares on Facebook to better illustrate what information is being shared on the social-networking site.

The agency also made minor cosmetic tweaks to features that are not currently optimized for users.

For example, it changed navigation on the homepage multimedia box so that the options are clearer within each panel of the box. Designers also swapped the "Connect" and "About NASA" buttons in the top navigation bar to reduce confusion.

"We found several users intuitively saw 'Connect' and thought 'Contact' since the words are similar and that's a more standard placement for contact information," according to a blog post on NASA's site explaining the tweak.

NASA has other improvements to the site in development, including updating the Twitter box on the home page so people better understand which tweets are coming from where.

Other social-networking tweaks the agency plans to make include a direct integration with Facebook and Digg so people can "Like" NASA pages without having to share them on social networks. NASA also plans to make the site more smartphone-friendly, it said.

Because of the nature of agency activity, NASA has embraced rich media capabilities and social-networking in its Web design in a way that other federal agencies haven't.

To keep track of all of these features, NASA recently worked with an online archive service to create an repository for all of the images and videos, as well as all of the social-networking activity on the site so people can access it from one central Web location.