Blog

March 30, 2016

How we share a visual style across multiple sites

By Marco Segreto

In developing a redesign for cloud.gov, we needed a technical solution to coding the visual style that would scale to multiple sites with separate codebases without requiring us to copy code. Our solution is our “shared style library”, a library of CSS, JavaScript, images, and fonts that can be distributed to multiple codebases to create a shared visual style.

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March 29, 2016

Best practices for building an accessible website using the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards

By Maya Benari , Julia Elman , Nick Bristow

When you work for the federal government, accessibility isn’t simply a nice-to-have — it’s the law. That’s why the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards set developers on the path of creating websites that anyone can use. The Draft Standards feature documentation that can help you keep your websites accessible, even after you make modifications.

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March 28, 2016

Interesting things we learned from examining traffic patterns on analytics.usa.gov

By Melody Kramer

Ten federal agencies now have public dashboards and datasets for their web traffic on analytics.usa.gov. The dashboards show insights into how the public interacts with specific agency websites.

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March 25, 2016

How design consistency helps users navigate federal websites

By Melody Kramer , Carolyn Dew

We launched the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards last September, and over the next month, we plan to explore various topics related to design standards. In this post, we detail how our user research informed the decision decisions we made.

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March 24, 2016

Video highlights from 18F speeches over the last year

By Andre Francisco

Over the past year, members of our distributed team have given talks in over 30 locations about how we’re changing government digital services. Topics have ranged from how we work to how we help the government build and buy software to how people can join the 18F team.

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