About EIA.gov

Our website, EIA.gov, is the primary communication channel for the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and serves as the agency’s world-wide energy information point of contact for:

• Federal, State, and local governments
• The academic and research communities
• Businesses and industry
• Foreign governments and international organizations
• The news media
• Financial institutions
• The general public

From January-December 2011, there were 27 million visitor sessions to the site, averaging 2.25 million visits per month. The site consists of approximately 500K files of all types that support our 1,300 publications and products, 39 email subscription lists, and 10 RSS feeds.

EIA has forged a tradition of excellence for its public website, thanks to a solid vision for a high-quality presence on the web and hard work throughout the agency. The EIA website has become the public face of the agency and its information, data, analysis, and services have informed policy and programmatic decisions at all levels in regards to energy and its interaction with the economy and the environment. Key indicators of the site’s success in serving our customers include:

• 421,000 total subscriptions to EIA email update lists in April 2012.
• Major search engines (like Google and Bing) refer to us an average of 417,000 visitors a month searching for energy topics.
• 5,760 websites linking to EIA.gov.
• Search engine rankings of EIA on Google indicate very strong performance on relevant key topics.
• 90% of our customers say they are satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of the information on our website.
• 73% said they found what they were looking for on our site.
• 78% of the first-time visitors said they were very likely or somewhat likely to return to our website.
• 78% said the level of detail on the site was just right; 11% said the content was not detailed enough. Only 1% said the content was too detailed.
• 85% said they found useful information on our website.
• The top three words customers use to describe EIA are informative, objective, and expert.

Introducing the new look of EIA.gov

On February 8, 2011, EIA launched the first phase of a comprehensive website redesign effort. All of the information that more than 2 million visitors find each month at EIA.gov is still here, along with:

• Today in Energy — a new energy education product published every weekday that features timely and topical bites of our information in plain language, and allows us to highlight current issues, topics, and data trends.
• New homepage and improved navigation to make it easier for customers to find the abundance of EIA information and data and better showcase the breadth and depth of EIA content.
• Updated logo and dramatic new visual identity to help re-introduce EIA, its initiatives, and its programs.

EIA's new website is the latest in a series of initiatives that improve the agency's capacity to meet the evolving needs of our diverse customers. Further improvements to the site are planned throughout 2011. This was the first major redesign of EIA.gov in six years and the third since its inception in 1995.

If you think the redesign could affect the way you access data from EIA.gov, please contact us at webmaster@eia.gov. Comments or questions about the new website are encouraged and can be sent to ifeedback@eia.gov

How to link to EIA.gov

EIA.gov is a public domain website, which means you may link to it at no cost and without specific permission.

Creating a web editorial style guide

This Guide helps EIA writers produce consistent, correct, and readable web content. It provides guidance on style issues - including capitalization, punctuation, word usage, and tone - most relevant to EIA writing.

The Guide addresses some issues that are particular to web writing, such as writing effective hypertext links, but most advice applies to all writing.

This is a style guide, not a rule book. Unlike grammar that has specific rules that cannot be broken, many style issues are preferences. Writers and editors may differ. The Style Guide provides guidance on style issues so that the content of our website has uniformity that conveys professionalism.

Style consistency enhances our credibility. Inconsistencies in style or misused words might cause users to question the accuracy of our data. Using a uniform style throughout our website tells users that EIA has high quality standards for our content and our data.

The Guide is posted as a wiki on our employee intranet to allow flexibility. Changes and additions of new topics and examples are made when needed to improve the coverage and clarity.