We examined the home pages of the 50 US states over the years 1997–2002 to discover thedimensions underlying people’s perceptions of state government home pages, to observe how
those dimensions have changed over the years, to identify different types of state home pages,
and to see how these types have changed. We found that three primary dimensions explain the
variation in perceptions of home pages. These are the layout of the page, its navigation
support, and its information density. Over the years, variation in navigation support declined
and variation in information density increased. We discovered that four types of state
government home page have existed continuously from 1997 to 2001. These are the ‘Long List
of Text Links’, the ‘Simple Rectangle’, the ‘Short L’, and the ‘High Density/Long L’. To this
taxonomy, two other page types can be added: the ‘Portal’ page and the ‘Boxes’ page. The
taxonomy we have identified allows for a better understanding of the design of US state home
pages, and may generalize to other categories of home pages.