The State Department has made multiple upgrades to MyStateDepartment, a portal launched in January that gives users a way to access foreign policy topics that interest them most.
State Department Office of Website Management Director Janice Clark told FedScoop the updated portal includes the following:
- improved functionality of the interface with a cleaner look;
- added RSS feeds from other websites, such as foreign-language translations from another office, and travel warnings from travel.state.gov;
- added flexibility in moving the widgets around;
- added a freshness date to the widgets so users can see how recently a new item was added;
- reorganized topics to make them more logical to end users;
- added more than 200 additional topics widgets, giving MyStateDepartment a widget for every country in the world.
“Since www.state.gov is such a large site with vast amount of content, we wanted to make it easier for our audiences to be able to get the latest updates quickly without having to navigate through a lot of other information they may not be interested in,” Clark said.
The MyStateDepartment pilot in January included about 40 widgets that focused on the State Department’s top priority foreign policy issues and categories.
Clark said the department would like to add widgets that pull in content from some of the agency’s other websites, such as travel.state.gov, which is in a different content management system. The agency currently provides access to their RSS feeds, but would like to be able to include more, such as passport information.
