Photo Credit: James R. Tourtellotte

CBP’s Web Technology Team has received accolades for creating a user-friendly, well-organized website on behalf of the agency. Back row: Chris Grob, Melissa Murphy, Steve Chau, Ryan Brown, Teresa Cronnell. Middle row: Marco Tonolete, Stephanie Edwards, Ken Mak, Glenn Corcoran. Front row: Patty Schied, Linda La Jeunesse, Purnima Bhargava, Jeff Smith.

The Web Technology Team in the Office of Information and Technology was among 22 website teams who received a “Government Standard of Excellence” award from the Web Marketing Association in 2006. Nonetheless, it was a pleasant surprise when Steve Krug, one of the web industry's well-known "gurus," spent well over an hour out of an eight-hour web site best practices conference extolling and critiquing the CBP website.

At the “Don’t Make Me Think” workshop, sponsored by a vendor-neutral analyst firm, Steve Krug reviewed what are some logical, user-friendly ways to organize information on web sites. He used U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s CBP.gov website to showcase what a good example of all these good practices would look like.

Teresa Cronnell, of the Web Technology Team, who in 2001 worked with all CBP web content administrators (WCAs) to gather the requirements for the website, says that the website is so functional because its layout was decided through comprehensive CBP-wide collaboration. CBP.gov as well as CBPnet were designed to enable the WCAs to present “current information in a logical information architecture, while providing alternative avenues for customers to find the information they need quickly,” says Cronnell.

Thanks to the Web Technology Team, CBP’s web site is a user-friendly, well-organized place to visit.