Energy.gov

Shaking Hands With an Octopus

The U.S. Department of Energy Web site, www.energy.gov, needed to be re-designed and re-engineered. Serving both visitors and DOE employees, the Web site serves as a portal for over 4,000 dependent sites managed by DOE agencies. In addition to developing a standard look and feel for the DOE and all of its agencies, they also wanted an easy-to-use content management system (CMS).

Web Design that Streamlines Informaton Architecture

We were brought into DOE to redesign and provide Content Management for a 3 year old Web site that was inappropriately and largely geared toward consumers.

There were major issues that had to be addressed including desegregation of Intranet and Web site; removal of sensitive documentation; and providing a publishing platform that would work across the agency. To organize such vast amounts of information and such a large number of sites, we began designing the DOE Web site with a topic-oriented approach.

Our focus was to implement a taxonomy that had never before been established within this large agency and apply it to the new Web site. We worked with a task force of 36 people, all with differing opinions of what was important to the organizations and in some cases, we had to ultimately change how the organization thought about itself.

On the backend, it was natural to integrate Brook Group’s award-winning CMS, Tacklebox, offering a practical, highly scalable solution to their publishing system needs.

Working Together

“Working with such a large group of folks all with differing opinions is usually a recipe for disaster. In this case, our audience analysis and matrix got everyone on the same page, making approval processes easier than I could have imagined,” said Kara Brook, President and CEO of Brook Group.

Reaching a Wide Audience

The DOE Web site is used by visitors and employees ranging from Kindergartners to research scientists. By identifying the key stakeholders, the process resulted in an audience matrix document which helped guide a site design and information architecture that simplified the interface and sped up information access.

By emphasizing the topics in the primary navigation and providing windows for key audiences that steered seamlessly to relevant organizations, Brook Group reduced a maddening maze to a virtual straight line.

Employees and visitors can now easily find information they need with a few short clicks.

Simplifying Government Web Design

Tacklebox, Brook Group’s own CMS, was deployed, eliminating the need for time-consuming HTML. This robust and scalable publishing system contains every supporting site, keeping each in line with the design and branding of the DOE site.

Every member organization now has access to their own content, housed in a central location for easy re-designs and additions. Tacklebox also manages workflow by enabling security approvals to the publishing process to avoid conflicting and inappropriate publishing.

The site is also fully Section 508 compliant.

And the Winner is…

This site and the Tacklebox CMS was awarded Content Week’s Internet Best in Class 2004 Award.

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