Two Mississippi State units recently combined a wealth of information into one user-friendly web site.

Fourteen months in the making, MSUcares.com is a joint effort of the MSU Extension Service and the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station. Each unit had maintained a separate web presence, but now have pooled their information into one site.

Virgil Culver, leader of the MSU Food and Fiber Center, chaired the committee charged with overseeing the design process.

"The previous web sites were designed to parallel the organizational structures of MAFES and Extension," Culver said. "This new site incorporates many of the user-friendly design features of the most popular sites on the Internet."

Culver said the previous web pages primarily targeted MAFES and Extension employees. The new design is "customer-driven."

The MSUcares web site has about 1,500 educational publications online, many cross-referenced to make them easier to find. For example, tomato gardeners can find fertilizer, pest and variety information from several sources.

Those who can't find the answers they're looking for at the site can get individual attention by e-mailing their questions to university specialists.

"We also wanted to make the site easier to find by giving it an easier name to remember," Culver said.

The "cares" in MSUcares.com stands for Coordinated Access to the Research and Extension System. The previous addresses were abbreviations for organizational names.

Designers chose a "dot.com" address for the web site to make it easier to remember and find. The decision to use a commercial address for an educational site was made because consumers have come to expect web addresses to end in "dot.com."

"We're hoping people will make this the default homepage that appears when they turn their computers on," Culver said.

Patsy Sykes, web designer and trainer in the Office of Agricultural Communications, said an additional feature is easy access to current news stories from the university's Extension and research programs.

"The web site always will be a work in progress," Sykes said. "Visitors will see something different almost every time they check the site."