Communication Standards Blog

Updates to EERE's Print Templates and Identity Guidelines

Elizabeth Spencer — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:21:00 -0400

We're pleased to announce that we have an updated version of the EERE Identity Guidelines and updated EERE print and CD templates posted on the EERE Communication Standards website.

The EERE Identity Guidelines include guidance on the use of colors, fonts, visual identifiers and logos, and other aspects of EERE information products to provide a consistent approach to EERE's communications products.

This updated version reflects a few key changes:

Increased flexibility. Programs are encouraged to be innovative in their writing and design. Programs may use the templates to save time and money, but are welcome to create their own designs as long as the new designs follow the minimum requirements of the new QA checklist.
A new QA checklist. The guidelines include a QA checklist to help delineate the recommended versus required elements.
Key messages have top billing. Place the most important information at the top of your document. Program names are no longer required to be in the top banners unless you are developing a product about an EERE program.

The new print and CD templates have a few minor color changes and updated boilerplate information.

If you have any questions or suggestions about the updated guidelines and templates, please feel free to contact Scott Minos.

Designing a Widget? Check Out the New Widget Style Guide!

Elizabeth Spencer — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:39:00 -0400

For the last few years, widgets have been a popular topic at EERE. And if you've checked out the social media links on the EERE home page, you might have seen a few of the widgets that EERE has created. But if you're interested in making one for your EERE Program or Office, you'll probably want to check out our brand new style guide for widgets.

Our new style guide, Identity and Design Guidelines for Widgets, walks you through the size, fonts, and colors that you should use for an EERE-branded widget, and shows you how and where to include the EERE logo.

If you're interested in learning a little more about widgets—or about other kinds of social media available for EERE sites—then you should check out the Social Media page for information about what kinds of social media you can use on your sites.

And, like always, if you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment here on the blog or email the Communication Standards Webmaster.

Getting Fast Track OMB Approval for Your Surveys and Usability Tests

Elizabeth Spencer — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:30:00 -0400

If you attended the last Web Coordinators meeting, you’ve already heard a bit about using OMB's fast track process for your surveys and usability tests. And now we've also updated the Communication Standards page about surveys with information about when you need approval and how to get it when you do.

Basically, if you ever collect information from more than nine members of the public—whether it's a survey or a usability test—you need to get approval from OMB to run that test. Most surveys on EERE should quality for fast track approval as long as:

The data collection is focused on improving existing or future services, products, or communication materials;
The data collection is voluntary;
Statistical rigor is not required;
The burden on participants is not high; and
You won't distribute the results publicly.

Surveys that don't meet this requirement must go through a different process to get approval.

But when you're planning a survey or a study, remember to be aware of Personally Identifiable Information, too. PII, as it's called, has to be treated in a special way and stored on a secure server. You should always try to minimize the amount of PII you collect, and you should certainly never ask for information you don't actually need for your analysis.

If you have questions about PII, ask Drew Bittner. If you have questions about surveys and the OMB approval process, you can ask Wendy Littman.

And, as always, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about this update or the Communication Standards website, feel free to leave them in the comments or contact me through the Communication Standards webmaster!

Introduction to Standards Podcast: Posting Videos

Elizabeth Spencer — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:18:00 -0400

Even though there aren't all that many videos on EERE, we always seem to get a ton of questions about how to post them. You might remember that we updated our video standards back in September. And now, to make the process even clearer, we've released the next Introduction to Standards Podcast, called "Posting Videos on EERE and YouTube."

The podcast takes you through the process of posting a video on EERE. It explains how the DOE YouTube channel works and what you have to do to get posted there. It also explains how videos that aren't eligible for the YouTube channel can be hosted on EERE instead.

The podcast talks mostly about the posting process, so it doesn't go very deeply into making videos accessible. You can read more about those on the Video and Text Version pages.

But if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them here on the blog! As always, I also can answer questions through the Communication Standards Webmaster.

Everything You Need to Start Working in the EERE Web Template

Elizabeth Spencer — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:55:00 -0400

If you're building a new EERE website, creating a subsite, or just maintaining an existing one, you know that you need to know the basics of the EERE template to run a successful site. To make this easier, we've expanded the information at the Templates page and clarified the information at the Graphics page.

The Templates page explains the basics of the current EERE template. If you make a new site, it'll probably be in the standard EERE Web template. There are a few exceptions, which are explained in the "Partnership Sites and Template Exceptions" section. But since most sites will be in the EERE template, the page explains what you need to know—how to get your template files, what the color palette is, and how to check the color contrast on your text.

We also added a few details on to the Graphics page. This round we just added some information on checking color contrast. But remember, this is the page that explains how large images and feature graphics can be in the current and the 2003-era template. So if you're making or maintaining a site, you'll want to have those numbers on hand.

And that's it! If you have any questions about the EERE Web template, feel free to leave a comment here on the blog or email us through the Webmaster form. And if you have any ideas or suggestions, we'd be glad to hear them!

Check out the New Communication Standards Website!

Elizabeth Spencer — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:35:00 -0400

There haven't been a lot of updates recently, and for good reason—we were updating the site! Check out the new look on Communication Standards. And please, tell us what you think!

Over the last year, we've been doing a lot of testing to see how we could improve the site. First, we asked a number of the Office of EERE's federal workers and contractors to help us with a card sort. We knew the old site had grown too large for the navigation and that people were having trouble finding what they needed, especially when it was more than 4 levels down in the site. So we tried to figure out how you all would organize the content if it was left up to you.

We used that data to reorganize the site. But, not content to leave it at that, we ran another test. And we went back to our pool of EERE employees and contractors and asked them to test our proposed structure. We used that data to make a few more changes to the navigation.

And now it's all done! I hope that the new site is easy to use, and that you have an easier time finding the resources that you're looking for. If you have any questions or ideas about the new site, please leave a comment here on the blog or email the Communication Standards webmaster.

And if you helped us with our testing, by participating in our survey, card sorting, or navigation testing, thanks so much for your help! I hope that all our work has made a better site.

Video Standards Update: Skinning videos just got easier!

Elizabeth Spencer — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:53:00 -0400

We've just finished a big update to the video standards! From here on out, it should be a little easier to skin your videos. Also, you can start hosting your videos and their files on your own servers again.

The process of posting a video will start out the same as always: You make a video. If your video meets the requirements for DOE's YouTube channel, then you're good. You can forward your video and a Word file with its captions to DOE. And then you're done!

But if your video can't go up on YouTube, you'll have to ask your designer to convert your video to one of our approved formats (FLV, F4V, MOV, or MP4) and, if possible, get it to meet our best practices for compression, formatting, length, and branding.

And once your video is fully formatted, you're ready to put it into the EERE skin—the outer shell that includes the play, pause, stop, and closed captioning buttons. Previously, you'd have to find a designer who knew Flash to put your video into the skin. That's no longer the case!

Now an HTML developer can upload your video, caption file, and banner image to your site. Then they'll need to update the code in our video embed code to match your files. Once you put that code onto your site, your video will be loaded up fully-skinned, captioned, and ready to go live.

There's one other change in here: EERE Programs are no longer required to host their videos at eere.energy.gov/multimedia/. So feel free to start uploading your videos and all their parts to your own /media/ folder.

And that's it! As always, leave a comment here or on the Communication Standards webmaster if you have any questions.

Updates to the EERE Style Guide

Elizabeth Spencer — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:35:00 -0400

We've updated the EERE Style Guide again! The biggest change is that "e-mail" is now spelled "email," without the hyphen. (However, other "e-" words, such as "e-business" or "e-book" still require that "e-.") You can see all of that at the email entry.

We also provided some guidance on ampersands and when you should (and shouldn't) use them.

The EERE Style Guide is used for all of EERE's Web products. Remember, the Style Guide is only used for Web products, and doesn't have guidance for publications or exhibits.

And, as always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them here on the blog!

Expanding the Browser Testing Suite and the Graphic Standards

Elizabeth Spencer — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:01:00 -0400

Today we have two updates to announce! First, the EERE Browser Testing Suite has been updated to include Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9, and Google Chrome 12. But that's not all! We also updated the graphic standards to help you make images for the older and newer versions of the EERE template.

First off, let's talk about the testing suite. Every month, we check to see what browsers our visitors are using. Once more than 5% of our visitors are using a specific browser or browser version, we add it to our testing suite. Our developers test every website we make in all of the browsers in the suite to make sure everything displays properly.

We check our visitor statistics regularly and make sure that the testing suite matches. Today's updates reflect our most recent visitor statistics.

We also made an update to our graphic standards. As you probably know, EERE first rolled out its site-wide template in the early 2000s. (Here's what the old template looks like.) Over the last year, we've been moving sites into the new template. (And here's what the new template looks like!)

We're in the middle of a very exciting period here at EERE, and there's a lot of talk about how our template will change in the next year. But no matter what happens in the future, we all need to know how to work within the templates we have now. So the Graphic Standards page was updated to include the maximum image sizes in both templates.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them here on the blog.

Remember Your Marketing Plan and Content Review for New Projects

Elizabeth Spencer — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:32:00 -0400

As mentioned in recent Web Coordinator Meetings, we’ve instituted two new elements in our website development process.

One of the new requirements is to include a marketing plan for any project coming to the Project Review Team for its initial meeting. The goal is to ensure that as new EERE websites are created, there’s an accompanying strategy for how they are promoted. Examples of marketing avenues include widgets, blog and Facebook posts, GovDelivery notifications, cross-posting on other EERE websites, etc. Your marketing plan doesn’t need to be elaborate; it can be as simple as one Progress Alert to announce your new site or application. The marketing plan element is now a checkpoint in the task list and schedule on the project information form , and we just ask that you relay the plan to the PRT before your project goes live. We’ll give you more guidance about crafting your marketing plan in a future Web coordinator’s meeting.

The other new element is the content review process, which is also being added to the project info form as a checkpoint on the task list and schedule. About 18 months after your project goes live, we’ll ask you to reassess your project and its content. We’ll need you, at that point, to tell us which one of the following fits:

The content is approved as still current and valid.
The content needs updating (with notes on what specifically must be updated) or extensive modification.
The content may be archived and taken down.

Questions about these new processes? Contact Drew Bittner. And note that the revised project information form is available on the PRT wiki. Please use this version for any new projects.