Wednesday, August 27, 2008

New NGA Website Online Now! (NGA)

For those of you who have never visited the old NGA website it was, well, ugly. Really. Ugly. Lots of great people at the NGA and the product is, of course, fantastic but the website did not do the organization justice.

All that has changed with the new NGA site. Very professional and much more logically arranged. Complete with superslick video (that they foolishly made impossible to embed so I can't show it to you) and straightforward links to various important pages within the site (such as jobs and products and services), the re-worked site looks better and is more useful.

I was particularly pleased to see that the NGA has plussed up its history section. There are a number of useful tools there for educators including a nice monograph on the history of the NGA and a useful time line. My only wish is that they would put up some more historical pictures and documents of importance. There is also no FOIA Reading Room like the CIA has usefully established (hint, hint...).

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Ms. Wheaton,

Thank you for your kind words about NGA's new site. There was a large number of people who worked very hard to get the new site up and running in a very short amount of time. We are very pleased with how it has turned out.

We do have a FOIA Reading Room. It is in the left side menu on the FOIA page.

Bryan Strong
NGA Office of Corporate Communications

Kristan J. Wheaton said...

Bryan,

Sorry I missed the FOIA Reading Room.

Maybe I am missing something (again) but it appears to have only 2 documents in it. I am assuming that this will grow pretty rapidly as you begin to put all previous FOIA approved documents online (similar to the CIA's extensive database)?

Kris

markcblair said...

"Mr" Prof Wheaton,

Thanks for the update on the NGA (formerly NIMA) website. An analyst cannot understate the importance of the kind of IMINT that NGA has provided in the past. Echoing your comments (I, no longer residing on the high side) hope NGA pays more homage to OSINT, even if for a fee. There is a new breed of us out there and we need IMINT support too. We are supporting real-world ops and we miss our NIMA.

Best Regards to you and the hard chargers at NGA,

Mark Blair