A White House-led effort to revamp federal agency websites could result in one giant second-level doimain for all of government, although such an outcome isn't guaranteed, said participants in a July 12 live online chat on WhiteHouse.gov.

The federal government currently possesses 1,759 second level domains, according to a list posted online by the General Services Administration on the same day as the chat. The White House announced on June 14 that it has stopped issuing .gov URLs as part of a cost-cutting campaign; as a result of the campaign, at least half of those domains should be eliminated within 12 months, White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips has said.

Also on July 12, the executive office of the president announced it has formed a 17 member .gov task force that will study the matter of federal websites (scroll down for the task force members).

During online chat, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said the idea of a single second level government domain "is a great idea," but Sheila Campbell, head of GSA's web best practices team, cautioned that "the jury is still out" on whether it would solve problems with federal website management that have arisen in the past few years.

Key among those problems has been ineffective search, Campbell said. "We're negatively impacting how people can find information via search. With all the URLs, we're competing against each other, with other websites in the federal space for good search results," she explained.

Second level domains with lower levels of traffic relative to more popular destinations will not automatically be targeted for shutdown, Campbell also said. But, "there's a tendency any time someone has a new initiative to set up a new website, and that's the kind of thing we want to stop," Campbell said.

Federal agencies will soon have to report on how many websites they possess--current estimates peg the number to be around 24,000--as well as who is in charge of those websites, the last time they were updated, the intended audience and the tasks that the public can accomplish on those websites, Campbell added.

Federal web teams, Campbell said, spend too much time on design "and less amount of time than they should on content, and content is really king on the web,"

For more:
- watch an archived version of the online chat
- go to a USA.gov webpage on the .gov reform effort
- go to the list of all second level federal government domains

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