On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security rolled out an apparently redesigned Web site, after spending “more than a year of research and planning” and God knows how much money on the department’s incompetent webmaster. Going beneath the surface, it seems little has actually changed. And the new site has already caused significant problems for people trying to find information.

To be fair, there were a few positive changes. The new site design is based on CSS, a web standard for layout and presentation, while the old site internally used tables to lay out its various elements, a 1990′s era site design hack that has all but died out with the advent of CSS. Unfortunately, they’re still needlessly using one table for layout of one of the site’s elements.

And once you’re used to the new layout, things may well be easier to find. But when I first ran across the site, it wasn’t the site I saw, but a nasty 404 error page telling me they’d redesigned the site and — you guessed it — failed to preserve all the old URLs. This is one of many things that indicates poor site design, as URLs are supposed to be valid forever. It’s probably just as well, because the old URLs really sucked. The new ones suck a little less, but they still suck.

“I’ve linked to hundreds of pages deep within DHS.gov over the last ten months, and all of these links are now defunct,” writes homeland security analyst Christian Beckner of Homeland Security Watch. “Many of these links — such as the old link to the DHS IG page — are in many peoples’ bookmarks. An effort should be made to facilitate this transition, and automatically redirect people to the appropriate new URL.” Indeed, I’ve now got to go through this entire site and rewrite hundreds of links myself.

It appears DHS decided to just push the problem off onto the rest of us. “If you have bookmarked pages, or link to us from your web site, after locating the information you need, please reset your bookmark,” reads a notice on the redesigned site. This is why it’s so important to get URL design right in the first place, and the fact that they still don’t have it right is going to cause more problems down the road.

Washington Technology provides an update, saying DHS will create automatic redirects “for the addresses requested most frequently.”

It also seems the old graphics, which many webmasters across the Internet linked to in order to display threat advisory levels, are also being removed.

The backend looks like it’s still the same Java-based crap that drove the old site, only the ends of the URLs have been changed from “xml” to “shtm”. Did Homeland Security really take a step backwards here? Server-parsed HTML dates back to the earliest days of the Web, and is almost never used these days, with so many better and more flexible alternatives available.

And to add insult to injury, I could find no new features anywhere on the site. And the DHS webmaster once again failed to implement an extremely useful feature, RSS feeds. Even as many other government agencies are now using them to rapidly disseminate information, DHS seems to do whatever it can to make its web site as difficult to use as it can get away with.

Overall, I’m not impressed. Maybe after another year of research, they’ll discover this RSS thing. Or maybe Homeland Security just doesn’t want to communicate with us.