The District Department of Transportation on Thursday unveiled two different web sites designed to help them communicate better with the public.

The first is a redesign of DDOT’s home page, which in addition to making the site more attractive and easier to navigate, also represents a glimpse into the future for the rest of the D.C. government: other redesigned departmental sites using this basic template are expected later this year.

“We thought our [old] web site was great … in 2002,” quipped DDOT Director Gabe Klein. “But technology changes quickly. We didn’t think it was very interactive, to say the least.”

The site now offers things like video content and third party applications, a scrollable menu bar to make finding the most popular requests easier, and links to the latest department reports, including a brand new Annual Report (the first one DDOT has completed since 2005, according to Klein) and an Action Agenda, which lays out DDOT’s plans for the future.

The other web site DDOT launched today is called DTAP, or District Transportation Access Portal, which is still in Beta testing. DTAP was designed to provide detailed, real-time project tracking to residents and department insiders alike. Visitors to the site can locate nearly every progress report and budget update for a given DDOT project.