In October, Mayor McGinn presented the new face of Seattle.gov, a more streamlined city government website. Here's a screenshot of the front page of Seattle.gov. Yesterday, the city of Norfolk, Virginia launched their new website. Here's a screenshot of the front page of their website. The similarities between the two websites are striking. How striking? One page promoted a press release titled "Seattle Symphony to play free concert at City Hall."

Further, both sites feature a rotating picture on the front page, different layers of tabbed browsing, a central box full of recent press releases, with very similar contact information boxes running down the right hand of the page. Both pages are very alike in terms of style and formatting. Over e-mail, I pointed out the similarity to Norfolk.gov webmaster Ron Hiser. He responded: "We used [Seattle.gov] as a model. It looked very nice and clean. I tried to contact the webmaster but never got a reply. It would have made our job a lot easier."

However, at norfolk.gov/newnorfolk/ up until a few minutes ago, you could find a page promoting "Seattle Channel Videos" and press releases touting "Green Up Seattle," along with a link to "City of Denver Home" along the top. This is a screenshot of the page, and a detail is after the jump. When approached for comment about the Norfolk.gov site with Seattle city information on it, Hiser replied "It looks like it might be something that we were testing at the time to get different looks. We actually used our own coding but tried to blend some different looks together to see what might look best." At the time of this writing, the /newnorfolk/ page is no longer available.

When asked for comment, McGinn spokesman Aaron Pickus said, "We’re flattered that they liked our design."

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