Blog posts by Emileigh Barnes:

Government websites are written for an extraordinarily diverse group of users. They come to our websites with different knowledge, backgrounds, and abilities. Fortunately, there are steps we can take to make sure the content we care about reaches the audience we want (and is useful to them).

May 21 is Kids to Park Day— a day organized by the National Park Trust to promote nature, learning, and play. And if you’re lucky to have a fourth grader in your family, you can use the Every Kid in a Park program to access all federal lands and waters for free.

Our content squad is made of folks with a wide range of backgrounds and skills — we put this to good use by regularly asking each other for help with projects. Here’s a look into some of our recent collaboration.

We know good content when we see it, and we’re frustrated when we don’t. Keeping this in mind, are there ways that writers can quantify and measure their writing? We’ve looked at different tests you can run depending on the age of your audience.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has been working since the 1970s to clarify the rules for raising and spending money in federal elections, and today we’re thrilled to announce the first major content launch of betaFEC: a guide to registration and reporting that makes intricate information easier to understand.

As the 2016 presidential election heats up, here at 18F we’ve been working with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to make campaign finance data more accessible to the public. Today, we launched betaFEC, the first piece in a complete redesign of the FEC’s online presence. We were excited to work on a project that allowed us to delve into intricate campaign finance data, plain language, and the FEC’s first API.

We have an acronyms section in our Content Guide, a resource we heartily recommend. Acronyms and abbreviations also have a ton of associated history and nuance, which we’re shedding light on here, hopefully to encourage other authors and agencies to think carefully about how they use them in digital tools.

Every Kid in a Park gives U.S. fourth graders free access to all federal lands and water for a full year. Here at 18F, we were proud to develop the site in partnership with the U.S. Department of Interior and other federal land management agencies.

Web standards and accessibility expert Aaron Gustafson recently came to 18F to speak about progressive enhancement and to challenge designers to improve user experience across browsers and devices.

Last week, information architect Thomas Vander Wal came to 18F to lead a discussion on his research into social and internal collaboration in the workspace.

At 18F, we were thrilled to meet for a discussion on digital services, cyber security, and IT funding with Estonia's most prominent technologists.

As our team expands to meet federal digital needs, we've learned to appreciate documentation for its ability to turn new hires into self-sufficient contributors quickly, with minimal disruption to the organization.

On Friday, author and designer Dan Brown gave a talk at 18F. “Stop fighting, start designing,” centered around the design process and inherent conflict therein.