{
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    "type" : "single",
    "title" : "Step away from the PDFs! |Digital.gov",
    "description": "Step away from the PDFs!",
    "home_page_url" : "/preview/gsa/digitalgov.gov/bc-archive-content-3/","feed_url" : "/preview/gsa/digitalgov.gov/bc-archive-content-3/2013/12/06/step-away-from-the-pdfs/index.json","item" : [
    {"title" :"Step away from the PDFs!","summary" : "Every year, one of our office’s biggest projects is to prepare the Information Sharing Environment Annual Report to the Congress. This report examines the progress of Congress’s mandate in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 to develop a better environment of terrorism-related information sharing.","date" : "2013-12-06T12:55:07-04:00","date_modified" : "2025-01-27T19:42:55-05:00","authors" : {"leah-bannon" : "Leah Bannon"},"topics" : {
        
            "product-and-project-management" : "Product and project management",
            "user-experience" : "User experience"
            },"branch" : "bc-archive-content-3",
      "filename" :"2013-12-06-step-away-from-the-pdfs.md",
      
      "filepath" :"news/2013/12/2013-12-06-step-away-from-the-pdfs.md",
      "filepathURL" :"https://github.com/GSA/digitalgov.gov/blob/bc-archive-content-3/content/news/2013/12/2013-12-06-step-away-from-the-pdfs.md",
      "editpathURL" :"https://github.com/GSA/digitalgov.gov/edit/bc-archive-content-3/content/news/2013/12/2013-12-06-step-away-from-the-pdfs.md","slug" : "step-away-from-the-pdfs","url" : "/preview/gsa/digitalgov.gov/bc-archive-content-3/2013/12/06/step-away-from-the-pdfs/","content" :"\u003cp\u003e\n  \u003ca href=\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/digitalgov/_legacy-img/2013/12/Leah-Bannon.jpg\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"image\"\u003e\n  \u003cimg\n    src=\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/digitalgov/_legacy-img/2013/12/Leah-Bannon-246x250.jpg\"\n    alt=\"Photo of the author Leah Bannon\"/\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\n\u003c/a\u003eEvery year, one of our office’s biggest projects is to prepare the \u003ca href=\"http://ise.gov/annual-report/\"\u003eInformation Sharing Environment Annual Report to the Congress\u003c/a\u003e. This report examines the progress of Congress’s mandate in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 to develop a better environment of terrorism-related information sharing.\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\n  It’s a bigger and bigger PDF every year, but this year we created a web version as well. We used \u003ca href=\"http://getbootstrap.com/\"\u003eBootstrap\u003c/a\u003e to build a simple site for the report, inspired by the \u003ca href=\"http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digital-government/digital-government.html\"\u003eDigital Government Strategy\u003c/a\u003e. It was a great decision:\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\n  More Traffic! We saw more unique visits (pageviews) to the web version of our 2013 Annual Report in one month than the entire past year of downloads of the 2012 Annual Report PDF.\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\n  Better Metrics: We divided the report’s chapters into separate pages, so we can track which sections are most and least popular based on visits, average time spent on the pages, and bounce rates.\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\n  Better Sharing: We made every section, sub-section, and header in the report a link so we could easily share specific sections. This report is primarily a compilation of hundreds of stories of our partners’ successful information sharing initiatives or challenges, so sharing specific sections of the report is helpful to our partners.\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\n  Better Search: We were able to use \u003ca href=\"http://usasearch.howto.gov/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eUSASearch\u003c/a\u003e as the search tool for our Annual Report, which greatly improved the search capability. Curious about our past year’s work with GSA? \u003ca href=\"http://search.usa.gov/search?affiliate=ise-annual-report-2013\u0026query=gsa\u0026commit=GO\"\u003eCheck it out.\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\n  Mobile: Our web version is responsive to any screen size, and building that in was easy with Bootstrap. Twenty percent of our visitors are on mobile devices now, and that number keeps growing.\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\n  More Accessible: HTML is a standard, text-based format that is much easier to parse for text, data, structure, etc. than PDF. This web version is more accessible and machine readable.\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHow We Did It\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\n  As I said above, we used \u003ca href=\"http://getbootstrap.com/\"\u003eBootstrap\u003c/a\u003e to build it, which is free and open source. You can also \u003ca href=\"https://github.com/info-sharing-environment/2013-ISE-Annual-Report\"\u003eview our report on our GitHub page\u003c/a\u003e and fork it for yourself! We are strongly committed to open standards and the open government values of transparency, participation, and collaboration, so this just made sense. We plan to use this model more and more, and we’re following \u003ca href=\"http://project-open-data.github.io/\"\u003eProject Open Data\u003c/a\u003e’s model for accepting public feedback and edits for some upcoming documents soon.\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eConvincing Your Office\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\n  We still offered a PDF version – and about a dozen people did request it. PDFs do serve their purpose; they will guarantee that your product looks the same for everyone. But when your goals include sharing the content with as many people as possible, HTML is a better approach.\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLeah Bannon\u003c/strong\u003e is a web strategy and open gov consultant for the Office of the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment.\u003c/p\u003e\n"}
  ]
}