The Story of Energy.gov: The Ins and Outs of Turning Energy-dot-Blah into Energy-dot-Awesome

This summer, the Energy Department relaunched Energy.gov with local information and resources to help consumers and businesses save energy and money. The relaunch included a complete overhaul of both the front-end and back-end design with a move to Drupal and a managed cloud-hosting solution. The new Energy.gov is a significant step forward in the department’s effort to improve digital communications, while also eliminating wasteful spending to the tune of more than $10 million annually. The Energy.gov reform initiative is part of the Obama Administration’s Campaign to Cut Waste, a dedicated effort across the federal government to streamline operations, end unnecessary spending and save taxpayers money. This summer’s launch incorporated eleven departmental program offices websites into the centralized Energy.gov platform. Work to move additional program websites and features to the platform is already underway. This presentation tells the story of what we did, how we did it and why. It will touch upon: • Content strategies for multiple audiences, • Clean, user-centric design, • Drupal as an enterprise CMS solution and • The power of going local with content, design and technology. As Secretary Chu noted at the time of the launch, “Our goal is to make Energy.gov easier to use, more transparent and more participatory. This next phase is part of our ongoing commitment to empower consumers and businesses with information, tools and services they need to create jobs, save money and find opportunities in the new energy economy.” I’ll discuss how we’re meeting that goal and where we’re going next.

Speakers

Time slot: 
Tuesday 10:45am-11:45am
Track: 
Nonprofit, Government & Education
Experience level: 
Beginner
Questions answered by this session: 
What it takes to build an enterprise web platform in government
How to acquire high-level talent and resources in a government environment
How to develop content strategies for multiple audiences within one web platform
How to build a business case for using open source in government

Comments

looking forward to this

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