This document provides tips and best practices for building better county extension websites, including making sites accessible, secure, mobile-friendly, and focused on the audience. It recommends incorporating features like share buttons, search boxes, and contact information, as well as using images, links, feeds and maps to engage visitors. County extension offices are encouraged to audit and update their site content regularly to keep it relevant.

1. Building Better Web Pages
Sonja Fuchs, Web Technology Specialist
Permission accepted to use some content from "Building the Web Backwards” by
Mike Vysocka, web developer at North Carolina State University

2. Baked In
• Accessibility
• Security
• Branding
• Usability
• Mobile Friendly
• Creative Commons
• Contact Information
• Search Box
• Share Buttons
• Uptime
Photo by Dan Parsons on Flickr

3. Is This Your Website?
What does this mean?

4. Dig In
Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hyacinthe_Rigaud

5. Who is Your Audience?

6. What Does Your Audience Call It?

7. Titles: Short and Sweet
Relevant

8. Say Bye to Inverted Pyramid
See Hubspot blogpost about skimmable
content examples

9. Picture, please
Don’t have a photo? Try: http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/agcomm/photos-illustrations

10. Keep Mobile in Mind
Date Range Visits to Ag
CMS sites
Notes % of all Ag
CMS visits
Aug. 2012 – Aug. 2013 53,256 4%
Aug. 2013 – Aug. 2014 103,545 94%
increase
11%

11. Mobile First
PC Mobile
- For more tips, visit my presentation Mobile Optimization Presentation Spring 2014
- If you don’t have a smartphone, sign up for Mobilizer to preview your website

12. The Web is Not a Newspaper
Easier to digest - skimming

13. PDF = pretty darn futile
• Must have Adobe Program to open
• Data usage on smartphones to download files
• Less searchable than a web page
• Hard to Share
• Can’t measure behavior
• Extra clicks
PDFs do not belong on the web, unless you’re CERTAIN people print it

15. Ag Comm Hard at Work
Redesigning Pubs pages to be web-friendly
with the option to download PDF

16. “Content Audit”
Photo by Roosh Inf3ktion on Flickr
Check every page on your site:
• Delete or update old or irrelevant content
• Add relevant content, as often as possible
• Make sure all links are working (Check My
Links add-on in Chrome app store - free)
• Call to action or “for more info” on every page
• Share on social media
• Test on mobile

17. Links
If it’s already online, link to it. No need to re-create.
Link to social media
Counties should have pages for these:
• 4-H Youth Dev
• FCS
• Ag & Natural Resources
• Community Vitality
If relevant, link to other NDSU ag sites like:
• Publications
• Crop and Pest Report
• Variety Trials
• NDAWN
• Crops
• Livestock
• FCS
• Community Vitality
• Apps
• Lawns, Gardens & Trees
• Extension social media
• Extension News
• Nourishing Boomers and Beyond
Fix link text:
• Burleigh County Extension, not
http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/burleighcountyextension/4-h
• Sonja Fuchs not Sonja.Fuchs@ndsu.edu
Ask local organizations to link to your site
Link to Impact Reports

18. Suggestions
Tell them who you are and what you do
• Bottineau does a nice job with Meet the Staff
• Burleigh county does a nice “Who we are” page
• Are you a courthouse?
• Impact Reports
• Check out Ag CMS How-To Guide for ideas
• Don’t put everything on the homepage. All your pages are potentially your homepage
Ugly web:

19. Ask an Expert Widgets
(eXtension)

20. Feeds
Image by RRZEicons (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Share info from other sites on yours
using the Feed Mixer Portlet

21. Events
• Create the event
• The event portlet will display events and allow you to put the event on your calendar
Events portlet
Outlook calendar

22. Google Maps
Create your own Google Map
Great way to show events or locations
around the state

23. Organization
• Editorial calendar
– Online Content Calendar example
• Build and schedule ahead of time

24. Questions? Need Help?
Web Technology Specialists
Sonja Fuchs (701) 231-6403
Bob Bertsch (701) 231-7381
Ag CMS training & tutorials
Web Services on Facebook
Ag CMS How-To’s on YouTube