Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here’s how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( Lock Locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Digital.gov Logo

Guidance on building better digital services in government

  • News
  • Events
  • Resources
  • Communities
  • Tools
  • About
  • Subscribe
  • Write for us
  • Contact

All Resources

Administrative Office Of The United States Courts

News and Events on Administrative Office Of The United States Courts

49 posts

The Content Corner: Will You Read This Entire Post?

Deep down we’ve always known that people only read a small portion of any content shared online. In many ways that can’t be fixed but there are ways to help people read more or at least scan better. There was a book I loved as a child that featured the Sesame Street character Grover, titled
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Apr 11, 2016

The Content Corner: Code is a Tool, Content is the Solution

It seems of late that the focus on coding and technology within the federal space has become out of balance with that of good, solid content. As I believe I have said before with regard to user experience, great technology with poor content is still worthless. Amazing code that delivers poorly written or designed content
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Mar 28, 2016

The Content Corner: Social Media Metrics and the Challenge of Effective Measurement

I’ve recently been required to focus more attention on social media from a federal agency standpoint and this has directly led to a greater consideration of content. One of my first steps was to begin sharing various forms of content and gauge the success of each type. In today’s post, I’ll share what I have
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Mar 21, 2016

The Content Corner: How Google Judges Your Content

Every week my main goal is to usually provide new ways to help you feed the content beast. However, today I am going to remind you of why feeding the beast is important, especially when it comes to your search engine rankings and helping users find your content. I’ve discussed key search engine optimization (SEO)
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Mar 07, 2016

The Content Corner: Government as API

Here at DigitalGov, we generally focus on federal governmental digital efforts within the U.S. It is where we live and operate, so it makes sense, but many governments across the world struggle with the same issues and leverage technology as a common solution. When I came across an article where Australia announced its “government as
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Feb 22, 2016

The Content Corner: Location-Aware Content

While January was about looking ahead, February is focused on content and many of the new possibilities and challenges that will face us as content creators over the next year and beyond. At the intersection of these two themes lies the genesis of my topic today: location-aware content. More than a Map One of the
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Feb 08, 2016

The Content Corner: Can You Leverage Cornerstone Content?

If you have a website, then you most likely have cornerstone content—though you may not think of it in that way or even considered it. Just as in architecture, a cornerstone is a basic and essential part of any online presence. Cornerstone content is also important to any new visitors to your agency site, even if you
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Dec 21, 2015

The Content Corner: Is Pair Writing Right for You?

Fresh from last week’s article about workflows and their importance in the content creation process, I stumbled upon a new twist in content production known as pair writing. Many of you familiar with agile methodologies or software programming in general should know the term pair programming. Pair writing hopes to take some of the same
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Dec 14, 2015

The Content Corner: Work Smarter with Workflows

I noticed recently that I have spent a decent amount of time discussing or referencing content workflow, but I haven’t spent much time on how to actually create or use workflows. Developing content workflows can be a fairly painless process that can make your regular content creation a much smoother and efficient process. Content workflows
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Dec 07, 2015

The Content Corner: The Balance Between SEO and the User

I always think of SEO like the dentist—no one really likes it, but you need to do it. Yet, despite my lack of excitement for the topic, this will be at a minimum my second post (here’s the first) about the relationship between creating good content and SEO practices. Today I want to dive a little
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Nov 30, 2015

The Content Corner: Good UX Needs Good Content

As DigitalGov focuses on user experience this month it is good to remember one harsh truth: You cannot have a good user experience with bad content. It is important to keep a “content first” strategy in place during any website redesign or new site development. It is so easy for the various disciplines involved in
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Nov 23, 2015

The Content Corner: User Research for Complex Systems

My office is preparing to embark on a complete redesign of a 10-year-old system that averages 20,000 users a month. The success and adoption of the new system design and the product as a whole will be heavily determined by how well our team translates users’ needs. Providing a good user experience will also play
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Nov 16, 2015

The Content Corner: The Joys of the Content Template

Many of us depend a great deal on subject matter experts (SMEs) to generate content that will eventually end up on our site. These are men and women that have critical knowledge to share with our audiences, and it is our job to make it match our various editorial and content guidelines. Using a simple
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Nov 02, 2015

The Content Corner: Twitter, Apple News and the Importance of Our Websites

First, McDonald’s started serving breakfast all day. Now, Twitter announced it is dropping its 140 character limit for tweets. Black is white, up is down. Or is it really that big a deal? Is Twitter just keeping itself relevant in the battle for your content? LinkedIn and Facebook were first with their strong push for organizations to
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Oct 26, 2015

The Content Corner: Helping Your Content Contributors

Recently, I shared some suggestions and personal lessons learned for agencies either shopping for a new CMS or preparing to revamp their content strategy and workflow. Let’s take things one step further and focus on arguably the most important parts of your CMS: the content creator or user. Arguments can be made that content is the most
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Oct 19, 2015

The Content Corner: Content Management System Considerations

These days you couldn’t be faulted for thinking your content management system (CMS) choices are limited to two open source systems and maybe an enterprise-level offering that no one uses anymore. And while it’s true that for the public sector the popular open source options are extremely attractive from a cost standpoint, if nothing else,
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Oct 05, 2015

The Content Corner: Harness the Power of User-Generated Content

As of 2015, Millennials spent 30% of their time consuming user-generated content (UGC), and 54% of that group find UGC more trustworthy than content generated by a specific brand. This covers everything from user-generated reviews on Yelp! to short-form videos. Another benefit of UGC is that it helps crowdsource the burden of feeding the content
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Sep 21, 2015

The Content Corner: Should You Stop Writing and Start Podcasting?

Several months or so ago, I raised the question of whether you and your agency should be podcasting. Incidentally, my post coincided with the launch of DigitalGov’s new podcast series. As I discussed in my previous post, the long-niche broadcasting format has continued to grow in popularity and success with popular podcasts such as NPR’s Serial and
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Sep 14, 2015

The Content Corner: Optimize Your Content

For the past several weeks, I have been writing about fairly cerebral and more technical aspects of content generation and language in general. This week, I felt it was time to get back to a more basic content concept: content optimization. Frequently when content optimization is discussed it is heavily focused on search engine optimization
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Aug 31, 2015

The Content Corner: Modular Design and Structured Content

Several months ago I discussed the concept of a world without Web pages and the importance of structured content and thinking about content, not pages. This week, I’m taking that discussion further by discussing the importance of modularity in Web design and how that complements our efforts to create more structured and reusable data. Break
Posts by Tyrus Manuel
Aug 24, 2015
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3

Join 60,000 others in government and subscribe to our newsletter — a round-up of the best digital news in government and across our field.

Return to top

Learn

  • News
  • Events
  • Resources
  • Communities
  • Tools

Contribute

  • Write for us
  • Host an event
  • Edit on GitHub

About

  • About Us
  • Site Policies

Social

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • RSS
  • Email us
GSA logo

Digital.gov

An official website of the U.S. General Services Administration

  • About GSA
  • Accessibility support
  • FOIA requests
  • No FEAR Act data
  • Office of the Inspector General
  • Performance reports
  • Privacy policy
Looking for U.S. government information and services?
Visit USA.gov
Report an issue