Solution: design/identity content management
Vertical: government

The U.S. Department of the Interior protects America’s natural resources and heritage, honors our cultures and tribal communities, and supplies the energy to power our future. The Department of the Interior employs about 70,000 people in approximately 2,400 locations with offices across the United States, Puerto Rico, U.S. Territories, and Freely Associated States.

Interior desired to leverage the success that the National Park Service had experienced with the CommonSpot Content Management System (CMS) so they engaged Fig Leaf to redesign the agency's public web site and work collaboratively with the Interior and NPS technical teams to implement the new site.

Fig Leaf hosted a creative session with Interior stakeholders to develop a new vision for the redesigned public site. The agency desired to provide an easy to navigate site which would enable users to quickly find information about the DOI and would include newly designed landing pages for each of the agency's eight technical bureaus:

• Bureau of Indian Affairs
• Bureau of Land Management
• Bureau of Reclamation
• Minerals Management Service
• National Park Service 
• Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement 
  
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
• U.S. Geological Survey

In addition to landing pages, Fig Leaf created functionality for visitors to quickly and easily subscribe to news by bureau via RSS feeds.  It was determined that many American seniors visit the DOI site so users can now click to change the web site font size.

The new DOI public website has received rave reviews for it's elegant design and easy to use interface.  DOI.gov is the first federal government site developed on CommonSpot 6.0 Enterprise version.  The site provides a variety of custom elements and rendering options for many news and multimedia elements using one base template with a single metadata form yet allows content authors to create many looks and feel that include: 

 

• Radio News Actuality Element with up to 6 audio clips per radio news broadcast that can be subscribed via RSS
• Podcasts of Secretary's Speeches, News Conferences, On-air Appearances that can be easily listened to right on the site, or that can be subscribed via RSS Custom Flash Video Element that allows uploads of DOI news video clips in Flash format that can be viewed right on the site with a flash-based Video Player that supports closed captioning XML for 508 compliances in addition to transcripts.
• The ability to filter and list DOI News, Media Advisories, Photo Galleries, Press Releases by terms and topics from a unified  content taxonomy that utilizes the CommonSpot 6.0 Taxonomy Module on the fly during page authoring process as well as when viewing published pages.
• The capability to customize the online identity of each bureau page under the DOI site via metadata - that includes consuming the syndicated RSS news from the bureaus and featuring them or hiding them as needed, replacing the bureau banners via metadata, listing desired custom elements that are  relevant to a specific bureau, etc. 
  

Fig Leaf worked closely with the NPS Infrastructure team to launch the new site in a new 64-bit environment.  This new virtual environment ensures that the site is fast and makes it easier to maintain.

Fig Leaf Software helped to improve the DOI’s internal processes by simplifying the website maintenance process, establishing efficient content management workflow and enabling ubiquitous browser-based updating for authorized users nationwide. The results enabled the DOI to easily update, produce, publish and maintain information in a timelier manner for their stakeholders and the public at large.