Okay, we’ve talked about the Congressional Management Foundation’s Deal Breakers and requirements for Legislative Content and to wrap up this series we need to talk about keeping everything organized. A fundamental requirement for any web site is to make it easy to find all of its great information.

Here are three rules to help:

Rule #1 – Have a Standard Navigation
The most fundamental tool of a web site to stay organized is its navigation. It seems pretty basic, but CMF notes many Congressional offices “break Web Site design and layout standards that Web users have come to expect.” I am a big fan of trying to “break the mold” and have a unique web site, but it is important to maintain certain best practices. Your navigation also presents the opportunity to start categorizing your content with drop-down menus.

Rule #2 – Organize Around Your Audiences
This brings up another important rule in keeping your site organized: know your audiences. Your site is visited by a wide variety of consituents, media and other inside the beltway types. In order for your site to organize content efficiently, these audiences need to be taken into account. One of the most overlooked assets in keeping track of audiences are your web site’s statistics. Take a look at what types of pages are getting the most traffic and work backwards to establishing your key audiences.

Rule #3 – Rank & Prioritize Content
I think that the most common mistake made by House offices is to have to much content on their homepage. There are too many services, too many legislative issues and too many news updates for everything to be dumped on your homepage. Instead, rank your content with 1, 2 or 3 for the number of clicks you want to require visitors to make to find different content. It’s going to be hard, but you need to try to have more 3’s that 2’s and more 2’s than 1’s! Another component to these rankings is timeliness. This stuff can and should change. Your featured issues this week/month should be different that those on your homepage next month.

So go forth and win your Gold Mouse Award, but remember even if you are one of the lucky few to be recognized by the CMF that your job is not done. This series of tips has been structured around the CMF criteria, but the goal is for you to provide a valuable resource for your constituents 365 days a year.

Other posts is this series: