While UC IPM’s website is well known for its high-quality content, the current website design is static and difficult to customize as our needs and user needs change. The improvements we’re making will benefit the user and also increases our internal efficiencies. Check out the newly designed Pest Management Guidelines, the first step towards our overall goal of having a database-driven website to improve efficiencies and enhance collaboration with others. We’re refreshing the Guidelines one crop at a time, so if the crop guidelines you’re interested in still looks the same, keep checking in the future.

The new design is more than skin deep. The graphic redesign focused on accessibility and improved access on mobile devices. The Pest Management Guidelines text was also added into a database (manually copied and pasted, then extensively reviewed to ensure nothing was changed). Databasing all 47 crop Pest Management Guidelines content will make it easier for UC IPM to present our content online and make global changes to content—remove a withdrawn pesticide in one place and all instances where it’s online are removed.

Next, keep an eye out for a visual redesign of the Pest Notes, starting with vertebrate pests. Not visible to users online will be our work to add pesticide information to the database—active ingredient names, example trade names, application rates, relative toxicities to predators and honey bees, and more—for both our agricultural and urban/community products.

Our working goals for the website are to engage users by using new technology for mobile devices and adapt existing knowledge into easy-to-use decision-making tools. The database should facilitate these goals as well as the long-term goal to develop a customizable user portal and the ability to search for information in many different ways (by pest, crop or plant host, management technique, or audience).