Our Blog

State vs. Agency Notifications:
Let’s Divide and Conquer!

Notification banners are a valuable way to alert website users to important information. However, these features are often used inconsistently across Delaware agency sites. Banners intended for emergency notifications are often used for non-emergency information, like event notification or links to existing pages on their sites. Here’s an example of useful and important information that […]

October 4, 2024

Choosing New Fonts for Lighthouse

One of the GIC’s main goals is to put accessibility at the forefront of our process. We always want to keep in mind those with visual, hearing and other disabilities as we make each website design decision. This approach calls for reconsideration of colors, backgrounds, and the text itself that we use. Many different fonts […]

September 19, 2024

End of Summer Dev Updates

Hello again! The GIC team is engaged in an important internal debate, agonizing over a hotly-contested issue: Is it actually summer until September 22 as the calendar says, or do Labor Day and the start of school mark the real beginning of fall? Our team is split into devoted camps of those who are still […]

September 6, 2024

Mid-August Lighthouse Dev Updates

The GIC team is hard at work, building our new Lighthouse design system. Every couple of weeks we’ll be checking in with a brief update on some of the more interesting aspects of our development efforts. Here’s what we’re working on now! Our web team has been building new components for Lighthouse, including: Let’s dig […]

August 15, 2024

Designing a New Header & Footer

Previous iterations of the Delaware State Common Look and Feel (CLF) provided a consistent header and footer for state agency websites to use, such as the ones on this webpage. Our new version of the CLF is called Lighthouse. Lighthouse represents a comprehensive design system that will unify even more elements of state websites. This […]

August 5, 2024

Introducing Lighthouse!

A New Vision For Delaware’s Common Look and Feel Guidelines We are excited to share a new vision for the State of Delaware’s digital experiences! It’s called Lighthouse, and it represents a comprehensive approach to the redesign of state agency websites. A quick reminder, the Government Information Center (GIC) was chartered in part to define […]

July 8, 2024

Data Informed Design

We’ve all experienced the frustration of navigating through a government website, desperately trying to locate the right link or form amidst a sea of information. Whether it’s fulfilling our civic duties, filing documents, or simply seeking new resources, the process can often feel like an uphill battle—overwhelming, inefficient, and downright frustrating. If only there was […]

July 2, 2024

What is User Research and Why Should it be a Part of Your Process?

In my role as a researcher, I often see projects begin by immediately developing a solution before truly understanding the problem, and whom we need to solve it for. User research can help define your target audience, and provide them with an outcome that meets their needs, with less focus on “checking off” a list […]

Introduction to Web Accessibility

Your agency’s website lets you serve Delawareans. It helps them find info about your services. You accomplish this goal by using good content management and design. They make the pages on your website usable by the people you serve. Web accessibility is a tool that improves your website’s usability. According to the World Wide Web […]

Welcome to our Blog!

Hello! Welcome to an important conversation that we at the Delaware Government Information Center (GIC) are excited to have with members of all our great Delaware state agencies about their digital presence.  We’re hoping to connect state agencies to the GIC, and to one another through this blog. We want to engage agency leadership, PIOs, […]

June 27, 2024