Our website has gotten an upgrade!

If you’ve been on our website since March 1, you may have noticed it looks a lot different.

That’s when we launched our new, revamped website, which we’ve been working on for more than a year now, and we’re very excited to finally be able to share it with the world!

So, what’s new?

We’ve added a lot of features to improve accessibility and usability on our site – some very noticeable, and some under the hood but just as important.

Here are just a few things we hope will make our website a better experience for all of you:

• Search: We heard you! We’ve been wanting to add a robust and easy-to-use way for folks to find things on our website for awhile now, but we wanted to make sure to do it right. We now have a search box at the top of every page on our site. We also have a filterable search page you can use, as well, where you can search by post type, topic, and date.
• More responsive design: We worked with a fantastic team behind the scenes on our site to make sure it is easy to use on any screen size, from your phone to your laptop screen.
• Accessibility and usability features: It may be subtle in how it shows up, but we had a lot of discussions about things like our fonts and our colors, to make sure the site is as readable as possible for everyone, including folks with low vision or dyslexia. For example, our body text, Lexend, is a set of fonts “intended to reduce visual stress and so improve reading performance. Initially they were designed with dyslexia and struggling readers in mind,” but they ended up helping all readers. We also ran our colors through several tests to make sure they work for folks with color-blindess or low vision. And we have some more things we’re hoping to roll out throughout 2024 to improve things for everyone even more.
• We re-organized things: We also spent a lot of time re-organizing our site in a way that we hope it makes it easier to see all of what we do at the NC Budget & Tax Center, and to make it easier to find tools and resources you may not have know we offer. We have navigation at the top and bottom of every page on the site that will help you get around.

While we’re excited about our new website, we know it’s always going to be a work in progress. We have some more ideas we’re excited to work on and hopefully launch later this year. We also want to hear from you now about what you think – is there something we could do to make it even more usable and accessible for everyone that we may have missed? (Did you notice a broken link or something that doesn’t look quite right?) Please email us with your thoughts at [email protected].

We also want to thank Ben S Johnson, who did our website design, and Courtney Miller at Floatleft, who did our website development. And thank you to Shane Larrabee at Fatlab, our new web host.

We hope, once you have a chance to look it over, you are as excited as we are about the new site!