The problem with typical .gov websites is that they’re “just very ad-hoc.” So says Hillary Hartley, deputy executive director of design team 18F. “Each agency has its own style guide, its own logo,” she says. There’s no consistency. Government websites have long suffered from a lack of standards. “As a result,” writes Molly Ruskin from the United States Digital Service, designers “spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel and recreating common patterns such as buttons, forms, and search bars over and over again.”

18F, a sort of design consultancy based within the General Services Administration (GSA), and the U.S. Digital Service have created a set of tools that might fix that. The U.S. Web Design Standards is a “plug-and-play” set of downloadable code that could help government agency websites look more related, not to mention more official. That, of course, is predicated on those agencies using the brand new tools. 18F and their team can’t exactly impose a law mandating that site developers use them; instead, they’ll be encouraging adoption through marketing and word of mouth, with their own site serving as a living example.