A new WSDA website coming your way

Hector Castro
Communications Director 

In a couple of weeks, the agency’s new public website goes live. The public should find this major revamp makes it easier for them to find the information they need. However, agency staff may feel challenged at first to find their program information and familiar pages. 

Developing a new WSDA website has been a year-long project intended to update the look and design of our site, make it mobile compatible, ADA compliant, easier for the public to navigate, and easier for our staff to manage.

The most significant change is the navigation. Our current website is organized primarily from our perspective, laid out by division and program names. The new website will be organized by general topics to help those who may not know (or care about) our organizational structure.

For example, on our current website, a visitor would find ‘animal feed’ information under the Food Safety and Consumers Services Division. But on the new website, that program’s information is under the Animal, Livestock and Pets category.

You’ll notice those types of navigation changes throughout the new site. 

The new website is scheduled to go public on April 22. We will announce it internally first to give agency staff the first look. Once it’s available, take time to explore the new site. Learn where your program information is located and how to get to it. Then, you can help customers and stakeholders to find what they want. 

Work in progress

Sue Welch, with the Plant Services Program, gets help from
Christian Rossi, Status Not Quo chief creative officer, at
training for web content editors.

Last week, many of your colleagues participated in training to learn the new system to update webpages and create new ones. 

Most of the content (page information) from the old site was simply moved over to the new one. Therefore, we expect that programs will spend time after the new-site launch updating many of their pages. 

The newly trained content editors and managers will also take state “Writing for the Web” training. As the look and technology of our website gets a modern upgrade, the language and structure of our online information will also transform over time as we adopt accepted practices that best serve web users. 

If you have comments, questions or feedback about WSDA’s new public website, you can email them to webfeedback@agr.wa.gov. 

In summary: The big reveal is coming! WSDA will soon launch a brand new external website. Look for big changes in how information is organized to help the public find what they need by topic rather than by our organizational structure.