Summer Web Activity

Sharing the high level work plan items we have on planned for this summer.

• Standardizing the page format for the City's Board and Commissions
  With over a dozen boards and commissions, the current information for each is similar but the format varies. The team will develop a new template so that meeting info, agendas, minutes, members and other key info is easy to locate and consistent across the groups.
• Parks & Rec content evaluation and redesign
  We have great parks. People love our parks. People use the web to find P&R info. For these reasons, we started a redesign process for two types of parks content: program information and individual parks. From usability studies to design studios with staff, new and innovative ideas are coming forward for new page designs.
• Landing page evaluation and redesign
  How do we make the landing pages (Arts & Parks, Business, City Services, Environment, Government, Neighbors, City Projects and Public Safety) more useful, informative and attractive? This is the problem we will tackle in design studios and usability studies.
• CSS organization and enhancements
  Minor style improvements can come from CSS tweaks so we are focusing on some quick wins.
• Increasing overall site font
• Creating more space between sections for visual organization
• Adjusting other font sizes to create a visual font hierarchy that draws the eye to key info
• Governance and best practices
  As with any enterprise level program, we continue to improve governance practices, provide site analytics for decision making and reinforce web best practices for all the web contributors.
• Citizen engagement
  Citizen participation is key to improving the website. Launching web surveys and enlisting citizens for usability studies are a start. Implementing tools that allow users to provide feedback on specific pages, like/dislike certain content and allow crowd sourcing to weight the suggestions are the next level.
• System support and upgrades
  Everything has a non glamorous side. We still need to support web content management users and perform system maintenance. We will also be working to install and test key upgrades to our system architecture:
• Alfresco Web Management 3.4.
• JBoss Portal 5.1
• RHEL 6

What's beyond Summer 2011? Some of the above items will start this summer but be released into the fall. We will be settling into a pattern of usability testing and redesigns for key areas which will continue into the fall. The redesign of the main page will follow the landing page redesigns. We will continue to improve the content delivered through the GSA. We will start gathering citizen and staff input on the next milestone for the portal, MyRaleigh.

Parlez-vous français? Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

No matter what you speak, we have got you covered. We recently changed from the previous translation service to Google Translate. It not only reduces our costs to $0; it provides numerous languages where as the previous was Spanish translation only . While we all know automated translations are not as ideal as bilingual humans, our bilingual humans did say that the Google service was a better automated translation.


In addition to new languages, we have a few more interesting updates:

• Landing page navigation links stay highlighted in blue when you are within a certain area (City Services, Arts & Parks, etc). We hope this helps user orientation within the site.
• Home page rotating headline images slowed to 8s allowing users time to read the subheading and see the image. The subheadings were enlarged and the hyperlink expanded for the rotating headline images as well as the large headline images on landing pages.
• Employment section has been simplified and all types of positions appear on one page. (Next addition to employment is making it an RSS feed for users and communication via twitter and fb)
• Our AddThis icons at the top of content pages that enable sharing via fb, twitter, email, print, etc have been updated. It also contains a count so you can see how many times the page was shared.
• We launched a Website Survey which appears on the right side of all the pages. The survey is fairly in-depth, but it allows us to get some information from users as we plan our next usability tests.

If you or someone you know might be interested in participating in one of our future usability tests, just fill out our participant form to get on our list.