A plain-looking Web design helped Fairfax County, Va., win the top honor for county portals at the Center for Digital Government's Best of the Web ceremony, held in late September in Hollywood, Calif.

Fairfax County initially had unveiled a flashy portal redesign to focus groups earlier in 2009, and citizens complained that it was visually overwhelming.

"They wanted to be able to find things and it was just too complex. There was too much going on," said Dave Molchany, deputy county executive for Fairfax County. "It was a lot of tans, a lot of greens and a lot of pictures."

The county portal team showed a scaled-down version to the focus groups. Satisfaction improved, but it was still lackluster, reported Molchany. For the county's third attempt, it abandoned the color scheme in favor of a minimalist approach. "It turned out white with some red and some blue and a few pictures, and the approval rating went up to about 80 percent," Molchany said.

Watch Video: Fairfax County, Va., discovers citizens prefer using a plain-looking government portal.

The result was a valuable lesson in the differences between what impressed government IT enthusiasts and what impressed the citizens who had to use that IT, Molchany said.

"[Citizens] focused on what was on the pages. They focused on how to find things. They focused on the services, and they no longer had to be distracted by a lot of pictures and a lot of other things that were really extraneous to doing business," Molchany remarked.