A special thanks to Jeffrey Levy, Director of Web Communications for Office of Public Affairs at
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for participating in this weeks GovLoop Project of the Week.
1. What prompted this redesign?
We constantly assess our home page, so this is the next cycle. Our last home page redesign was 18 months ago.
In particular, we realized the home page had become cluttered, so we wanted to make it clearer how people can accomplish their top tasks.
2. How long did the overall planning, design and development take?
About 6 months, but that wasn’t full-time. We were also doing several other things along the way, like revamping our Administrator’s site and our Earth Day site, reworking how we provide information about EPA, and thinking about how to restructure the entire epa.gov presence. We’ve also been writing social media policy and guidance.
3. What was used to design the site and what platform if any is EPA using? Is there a plan to switch in the near future?
It’s important to note that we haven’t redesigned EPA’s entire site, only the home page for now. More to come on the whole site.
We worked with a graphic design firm on the design. We’re not currently using a single CMS across epa.gov, but we’re moving in that direction.
4. What does EPA hope to gain from this redesign they did not get from the old design?
A more focused home page that helps people accomplish their top tasks. I blogged to provide more detail here: http://blog.epa.gov/blog/2010/03/23/a-new-face-for-epa/
5. When is this new face of EPA set to launch?
Within a couple of weeks.
Just because us GovLoop volunteers love you GovLoopers out there; here’s a sneak peak of the new face of EPA.
Nice! Can’t wait to see it live…strong work, @levyj413 and crew!
Love the behind the scenes take.
We did a home page redesign a few weeks back on GovLoop and it sure is hard to simplify and take out. Even though it is needed.
I really appreciated the EPA blogging about this process. As someone who develops fed gov science sites, I read all the blog comments with great curiosity. I noticed that you personally responded to many of the comments. I’d be interested to hear how the EPA decided to blog about the redesign and solicit comments and — in the end — what the actual versus expected benefits were.
Thanks, Naomi. But I have to tell everyone that you can see a live version of the sneak peek here: http://www.epa.gov/epahome/sneak.html. 🙂 It’s not like we’re hiding it.
Cian: we regularly blog about stuff we’re doing. Nothing new there – we did it in 2008 when we last redesigned the home page.
Congratulations! Changing your home page after 18 months is great – many web sites look the same for years. Regular redesign and improvement is the way to go.
Jeff – will the agency be looking at the non-English language versions of it’s home page?