Subscriptions and Most Popular

Screen shot from Landing page

A picture is worth a thousand words...so is a screen capture.

Introducing two recent additions to the City site:

• MyRaleigh Subscriptions launched 2 weeks ago. The new service replaces some more current communication tools and some outdated email list maintenance methods. It brings the entire City under one tool and offers some new departments access.
  With 100+ subscription topics, there is a topic for everyone. Instead of having to remember when an agenda is posted and go check the site, now you can sign up to get the link delivered to your inbox. 

• Most Popular portlets have been redesigned. Previously we just reported the most popular pages for the entire site. Now, we are displaying the most popular pages for each landing page for the last 14 days.
  Click on Arts & Parks, Business, City Projects, etc to see what is currently popular for those sections.

Join Us Thursday March 15th

The primary reason for this post is to invite people to the Wilmoore Cafe on March 15th to take part in another citizen engagement session. We will be hosting demos of some of the new layouts and the new design at 6p, 6:30p, 7p and 7:30p. 


But while I have you...it can't hurt to recap some of the activities from the past few months and the items coming up.

Jan - Mar 2012:

• Continue releasing news and events on landing pages.
• Finalizing page layouts and technical requirements.
• CAT Bus route images being added to page layout.
• Implementation and training of MyRaleigh: Subscriptions with City staff.
• Citizen engagement sessions on new design and layouts.
• Feb 27, 10a - 1p, Third Place
• Mar 15, 6p, 6:30p, 7p, 7:30p, Wilmoore Cafe
• Mar 23, 10a - noon, TBD
• Mar 30, 2p - 4p, TBD

Apr - Jun 2012:

• New header release to site with slight color adjustments for links and accents.
• New landing page layouts release.
• New park page layouts release (based on park page view analytics).
• New recreation program layouts release (based on page analytics).
• New CAT Bus route layouts release.

 
One of the exciting aspects of the Internet is its ever changing nature with new information, technology trends and growing user needs. The City has overhauled the website twice since it existed. Both times the site was completely recreated, redesigned and reintroduced to staff and public. Both times everyone had a hard time with a complete new site and extensive change. In order to keep pace with the Internet and to ease the pain of change on the users, the City is practicing a more fluid and gradual process of site changes.

While the new site is only 18 months old, the design and layout is at least 3 years old. We have also heard from users the need to reorganize and present content differently. For the changes with high impact on page visualization or organization, we will be making efforts to introduce these changes to people through usability testing or engagement sessions in addition to more gradual changes.

See Us at Third Place

Join us today, Monday Feb. 27, at Third Place coffee shop in Five Points. Chris Geyer will be there from 10a to 1p looking for eager volunteers to walk through some simple site usability tasks, provide some feedback on recent site releases and some new site layouts. It won't take up much of your time and it will provide us with good information to keep growing the site.
Can't make today but still interested? Chris will be frequenting other coffee shops around the downtown area in the coming weeks. Still won't work for you? Sign up to be a usability tester. We are always looking for people for usability testing and it can be done from the comfort of your own home or office via webex.

Our Look is Evolving

Our look has started to evolve, did you notice? We have started the process to slowly update the look and usability of the web. Some small changes have happened since the start of the year, but more noticeable changes are coming...starting next week.

You will see an updated feature image rotator on the main page which eliminates the thumbnail photos and streamlines the look. We are expanding the News and Events to the Government landing page. We have added print templates to make printing our pages easier.

The next set of changes will be header and footer changes that start to pave the way to the updated design. (You remember the design survey...you voted, right?) We will also be adding News and Events to the other landing pages as well.

We want you! The changes up to this point have been low impact as far as visual and data organization, but we do have changes coming that are high impact. We need you to help us test the new content with high impact. We want the opportunity to show you the new pages, see how you navigate them and provide valuable data for making them user friendly.

How? We have a couple ways to get this usability data. Starting later this month, Chris Geyer will be visiting coffee shops along Fayetteville Street and enlisting volunteers to preview new pages and test drive them. We will be calling on the usability volunteers that have gathered through our usability testing form. And, we will be hosting open meetings for anyone who wants to come, preview and test drive the pages. We will communicate all of these opportunities on the blog.

What can you expect to see and test? We have some exciting new pages for you...new main and landing pages; new parks pages which bring parks, playgrounds, community centers into one page; recreation programs and CAT bus route pages. All of which are some of our most highly accessed content.

Usability Testing Dates:

• late February to March
• Main/Landing pages
• Park pages
• April to May
• Recreation pages
• CAT bus route pages