 |
| NASA Headquarters in Washington DC [FILE PHOTO] |
Washington: As its digital-communications team prepares for the next
redesign of NASA.gov, NASA is asking the public for thoughts on what the agency
should be doing on its website.
NASA has set up a
forum on Ideascale to allow users to submit, comment on and vote on ideas.
Opened Nov. 19, the forum already has received 228 ideas from 970 users, who
also have posted 269 comments and cast nearly 7,000 up-or-down votes.
"The digital
universe has changed significantly since we overhauled www.NASA.gov in
2007," said David Weaver, NASA's associate administrator for the Office of
Communications. "Our focus now is to better integrate our web and social
media efforts, while continuing to improve the site's overall look and feel and
navigation capabilities. We welcome the public's input on how best to do
this."
NASA is among a few
government agencies making the most effective use of the Internet and social
media to communicate directly with the public. The landing of the Curiosity
rover on Mars in August was the biggest event in the history of the NASA
website. There were more than 15 million visits to the site during the event,
and the peak of 1.2 million simultaneous webcast streams for the landing was
more than double the previous record.
On social media, NASA
has 1.3 million Facebook likes, 3.1 million Twitter followers and more than
280,000 people in its circle on Google+. NASA's challenge now is to ensure its
social media audience knows it can find more information on the website, and
make the web audience aware there is a broader conversation going on via social
media.
Any new design
features also need to recognize the public's adoption of smart phones to access
online content. Notably, visits to the NASA website via mobile devices have increased tenfold
from 2011 to 2012 and now account for 10 percent of all site visits.