New EPA Home Page

I’m lucky enough to lead EPA’s Office of Web Communications. I’ve written a lot about our social media efforts, but another one of our roles is to manage EPA’s home page. We redo it from time to time, and this is one of those times.

Our effort started a couple of months ago with a new head of EPA’s public affairs office, who’s my boss’s boss. He had some specific ideas and also wanted to continue the good things we already had going. We consulted our heat maps and other input and came up with the final design.

As we have for each of the last few redesigns, we published a blog post with a sneak preview a couple of weeks before launch, to see whether we’d missed anything big. It seemed we hadn’t, so went forward for final approval, which came today.

More of a touchup than a radical redesign, we still made some significant changes:

• Reduced the size of the rotating banner (it’s gotten smaller over time in increments, so this continued the trend)
• Added a top tasks section in the top right corner
• Simplified the page overall, creating more white space and reducing its height
• Removed links to the latest blog post, which heat maps showed were getting no interest
• Added a new section of links to what you can do

We’re also trying out a new type of banner, with links to information about high-profile issues instead of the news-based banners we’ve done for years. We’ll still have some newsy stuff, but it’ll be much less common and only the biggest news.

We’ll look at stats to see whether the top tasks draw links and whether the issue banners are of interest, and adjust as needed.

Take a look and let me know what you think. 🙂

New home page: http://www.epa.gov

Old home page (from the Wayback machine): http://web.archive.org/web/20130314213552/http://epa.gov/