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You need to understand who your visitors are and what they’re trying to accomplish on your website. Much of this requires quantitative data from web analytics and surveys, but to get the best insights, you must experience your site, application or service through the eyes of your users.

To understand the full context of the needs of current or potential users, you can get qualitative data through user research, using tools like interviews, focus groups, and field research where you observe and interact with people in their real-life environments (ethnographic research)

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You need accurate web analytics, consistently applied across the organization and mapped to your business goals, so you can understand what customers are doing on your websites. This will help you make better, data-driven decisions on how to improve your sites and content to meet customer needs.

Explore Analytics Guidelines

Content is the reason your website exists. However, if your content is hard to find, doesn’t reflect your organization’s goals, or isn’t organized in the way your customers expect, you can’t truly meet your customers’ needs.

Your website analytics and customer research should inform your decisions on how you organize and present your content. You should perform a content audit next so you can identify redundant, outdated, or trivial (ROT) content that you can remove, archive, or consolidate. By doing so, you make it easier for your users to find what they need (and pick up additional search engine optimization [SEO] benefits for your site)

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If your websites and documents aren’t easily accessible to people with varying levels of ability, you’re not just creating barriers between customers and the vital USDA information they’re seeking—you’re violating federal law. USDA currently tests for accessibility to people with a wide range of disabilities including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological.

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Visual design is the “face” of your site. By strategically using images, colors, fonts, and other elements, you enhance the content and function of your page, engaging users and helping build trust in the brand.

By following USDA brand and digital guidelines—including using specified navigation and functional elements, logos, and web lockups—you can help ensure that visitors to USDA sites have a consistent experience, whether they’re looking for information on animal husbandry or zoo regulations (and everything in between).

This doesn’t mean that all USDA websites have to look the same. USDA agencies and mission areas still have the room to creatively express and fulfill their particular missions and serve their customer bases. (Rule of thumb: In between the top and bottom navigation bars, you can do what you want… as long as you also follow the best practices of modern web design.)

Explore Design and Brand Guidelines

Your development process must address everything from maintainable code, consistency, security, accessibility, and more. You need to build your websites so that customers are able to access USDA information no matter where they are—an office, grocery store, or the middle of a farmer’s field—and regardless of what device or browser they’re using. Furthermore, you need to deliver the best possible customer experience for your users by maintaining a high level of web performance, ensuring your content is searchable, findable, and delivered quickly. By following best practices and using consistent components, you reinforce the trusted brand of USDA and help assure your users that USDA websites provide official, definitive information from the United States government.

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USDA uses social media to reach the public quickly and easily, delivering information through a variety of platforms and formats as part of our integrated communications strategy. Social media can be used to communicate new developments at your agency and direct the public to critical information, like details about a current recall or wildfire. Agencies at USDA must only use tools that have been evaluated by the General Services Administration and whose Terms of Service agreements have been reviewed and approved by USDA's Office of General Counsel.

Explore Social Media Guidelines