Today, the site located at www.le.state.ut.us serves as a central nervous system, of sorts, during annual lawmaking sessions at the state capitol - providing instant access to bills, schedules, agendas, minutes and meetings for citizens, lobbyists and legislators alike, and tying together several separate sites run by the House, Senate and other agencies.
"Every year we're relying on it more and more," Senate Majority Leader Curtis Bramble said.
And if it suddenly disappeared? "I don't want to say we'd be shut down completely," he said, "but it would be going back to the stone age."
Given that sort of essentiality, perhaps the Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel - known around Capitol Hill as the ragtag group that flies toy gliders off the second-floor balcony of the House building each day at 5 p.m. - wasn't the most likely of agencies to be placed in charge of keeping the site up, running and relevant. But Web manager Mark Allred said that when the site began, it was little more than a bulletin board on which a few tech-savvy staff members dumped general legislative announcements.
At the time, it didn't seem to be the most important or time-intensive of tasks. And, Allred conceded, "we were just dumb."
As it became clear how important the Web would be to the Legislature, Allred made another rather counterintuitive move, assigning former art teacher Shelly Day as the site's architect.
Day - who had been hired as a research ace, not an Internet maven - didn't know a thing about building a Web page. And she didn't know enough to know what couldn't be done.
"I've always maintained that layperson's mentality," Day said. "And I've never seemed to be able to get into the mentality of a programmer."
And so, Day said, she didn't understand the programming nightmares that would be involved in getting the site to provide the services it now provides.
Live audio of every committee meeting in the building? "No problem," Day said.
E-mail updates for anyone who wants to follow a bill on its way to becoming a law? "Sure," Day said.
Cross-referenced hyperlinks to every bill, every legislator, every hearing, every vote? "Why not?" Day said.
Such features have impressed even the most discerning of Web users.
"I like it a lot," Pete Ashdown, founder of XMission, Utah's largest Internet service provider, said of the legislative Website.
Now, Ashdown said, he'd like to see the site take one more step toward digital democracy.
"The real kicker for me would be if you could leave commentary on the bills," he said.
That sort of suggestion might make some Web designers wince, but Day credits never-say-no programmer and resident Net guru Brooke Anderson for his willingness to make things happen.
"He's amazing," Day said. "I come to him and say, 'Can we do this?' and he says, 'we can do that - and also this, this and this.'"
Added Allred: "Sometimes I come up with an idea and I'm not even sure it's possible, but Brooke will program it."
For his part, Anderson is more humble. He said he's simply trying to stay ahead of the curve in terms of what people believe can be done on the Legislative page. And he frets that eventually, their expectations will catch up with him. "People are becoming a lot less tolerant about things being behind the times," he said.
In the meantime, the team that keeps the Legislature online has had no shortage of positive attention. Its site was named the best legislative Website in the nation by the National Conference of State Legislatures in 2005 and continues to garner attention from states seeking to improve their Web presence.
This month, that will mean guiding a group from Montana through the system that provide for push-button publishing of audio files.
"We do get a lot of compliments," Day said. "And we're proud of it."
