We hope you’re enjoying the new design. In addition to the updated look, we’ve made a lot of adjustments in navigation and content in order to provide a more user-centered experience.

Usability

We’ve reorganized our content to be more task-oriented and paid close attention to context and relevance.

You’ll notice the home page is a lot cleaner now. Here you can expect to see content which is relevant to everyone, as more specific information is now much easier to find.

The navigation at the top of the page represents the broadest categories of information. The links on the side of each page will get you around in that category.

Plain Language

It’s important to us that material we provide here is easy to read and comprehensible. Where possible, we’ve tried to communicate in less formal language and to reduce the overall amount of content on the site. Sometimes legal requirements impel us to use more complex phrasing and a particular vocabulary. If you have trouble understanding something, contact us.

Standards Compliance

Most of the contemporary standards for websites are focused on usability and accessibility. Because these are core goals of our redesign, we adhere to current published coding standards and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

The site will now print more cleanly and is usable on portable devices. We’re even considering adding an RSS feed.

Finally, the site is now operational on modern versions of browsers other than Internet Explorer; in fact, it behaves better on them because they are more standards-compliant than IE.

Accessibility

For those of you with vision or motor impairments or disabilities, our site should now be much easier to navigate and read. Making our content more accessible is important to us, and is an ongoing effort. If you have suggestions in this regard, please contact the webmaster.