Raleigh Portal Pulse

See Us at Third Place

2012-02-27T08:18:00.000-05:00

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

2012-02-10T17:30:00.000-05:00

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

Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012

2011-12-23T13:42:00.002-05:00

As we close out 2011, we wanted to highlight some of the work we have been doing in the last quarter and announce some of the new items coming in 2012.

Iconography, Know before you Click - We added PDF, word, email, etc icons to our links. The icons are a simple way to let you know what to expect from the link. No more, surprise, you downloaded a word doc!

New News, Plus Events - Yes, new news is a little redundant, but not when you have reformatted the look of the news. The news items have a standard format, embedded map and better RSS descriptions. Events shortly followed the news. With its day calendar look, you can quickly see what's ahead. Parks and Recreation has started adding their news and high-level events to the Arts and Parks landing page.

I Want To...have Categories - The 'I Want To' lists with the same headings across all the landing pages left people wondering if the list ever changed. Only people familiar with identical twins can ever tell them apart, so we went with fraternal twins. Each left navigation list has unique categories that align with the landing page. We hope the categories stand out from page to page.

Do My Eyes Deceive Me? - You are not getting younger and your eyesight isn't improving...we changed fonts and sizes. The move to the Verdana font and increasing the font size is the first step in a series of design changes. If you are really attune, you may even notice that the center column font is slightly larger than the left and right columns.

Design changes...?
Yes, we are updating the look of the site.
But you just...?
Yes, while the new site just celebrated one year, the actual design was older than that. And as we all know, design trends can date a person, which is why we should periodically clean out our clothes closets!
I just got use to...?
Yes, you have become familiar with the current look. We are going to gradually introduce the new design. The new design will give us more space for the content you want to read.
Oh yes...the mood boards!
You remember the four design mood boards. Do you remember the one you liked? There was one that stood out among the rest and it served as the basis for the new design.

2012, Happy New Year

The font change is the first of a series of changes. In early 2012, you will start to see the header area change as follows:

no more flash movement
gets taller
gets more functionality (search, weather, text size move in)
accolades will relocate above a revised footer

Late January 2012, the new header will move into place with additional functionality (calendar, maps, directory) in place. The color scheme will change as the new header appears. Moving functional elements into the header will open up valuable real estate on the page.

As the year continues, other landing pages will start to have news and events emerge on them, and then we will cut over to the new look for the main and landing pages. Scrolling images, news, events, more navigation links, departments and service links are coming with the new layouts.

We will also be rolling out new layouts for recreation programs and park pages based on usability testing and staff design sessions. We will have opportunities in the new year to see the new layouts and to assist with usability testing before the final pages are displayed on the site. We are always looking for citizens to help with usability tests, so if you are interested, just sign up!

Service Information Made Easy

2011-10-03T12:45:00.000-04:00

When is my new recycling bin coming?
What city council district am I in?
What day is my trash being picked up?

These are questions Raleigh residents ask everyday. Previously, we directed residents to the City's iMaps application to get these answers, but for some users, the iMaps interface has too much data and information. It was overkill for basic questions. Building upon the same GIS data, we have released a non-map way to find City service information.

Residents can now use the 'Find My Service' button on the City Services or Neighbors pages to get information about council districts, recycling, garbage, CACs, voting districts and more.

Citizen Collaboration

2011-08-15T11:31:00.000-04:00

It has been about a year since the City of Raleigh launched their redesigned website. While the redesign made improvements upon the previous site, it was not without its share of flaws. The team here has been working hard to add various changes since the launch with limited citizen input.

My name is Chris Geyer and I recently relocated to Raleigh to become an Experience Designer for the City, with the goal of enhancing the experience on the raleighnc.gov website. I want to let all of you know how we are planning to change the site for the better and that we want to invite you along for the ride. From now on, we plan on listening to citizen feedback during the design process. This represents a change in culture for the city that will only work if citizen involvement can educate employees about why this is a better approach.

So take a good look at the current site as it is, because it won’t be staying that way for long. I am bringing a change in perspective, innovative processes and above all passion for creating the best experiences for citizens to the City of Raleigh. We have a small team that manages the website, so don’t expect a huge change right away. Our goal is to treat the site as a living thing, changing and updating things slightly over time. Hopefully this will start to change the public perception of local government here in Raleigh, by listening to our citizens to ensure your experience on the web is a great one.

How are we going to accomplish all of this? Well, we have a long journey ahead of us, and while some things are already underway, the best way this can work is if we get citizens like you involved. We have already heard from a small number of you through our recent website survey that was up in June. While designing new pages for Parks & Rec, we have done some usability testing with a small group of citizens. These usability testing sessions allow us to hear what isn’t working on the current site, identify missing information and learn about how citizens want to find the information they are looking for. We plan to implement a feedback system in place on the website. We are going to interact with groups like CityCamp Raleigh to hear what you have to say and turn the tide against current elements on the site which don’t work.

To me design is about solving problems, and to do that to the best of my ability, I prefer collaboration so ideas can thrive and solutions can be much better for it. I am not some designer here to save the day. I am just someone who gets that working together can produce a much better result versus the traditional way of going at it alone.

So what we are doing is starting a call to arms, if you are a citizen in Raleigh and want to get involved in changing raleighnc.gov please let us know. You can volunteer for usability testing, so that we can understand what you need and are looking for on the web. Don’t be shy and feel free to drop me a line, by email or through twitter. I look forward to sharing more of the new directions we are heading in when the time comes and cultivating a relationship with as many of our citizens as I can.

The first step in the new open process being championed by the City is to meet up with citizens at the next CityCamp Raleigh group meeting this Wednesday night 6:30pm at Cafe Cattura in Cameron Village. Come join us and see what we have been working on and give us feedback.

Embedding GIS

2011-07-04T22:07:00.000-04:00

The Web and GIS teams have been working together to bring GIS to the web portal. Many of you have probably been using iMAPS, but now GIS is reaching deeper into the web.
The community center pages for Parks and Recreation now have the facility map embedded so that users can get an overall vicinity map of the area. The maps also contain zoom in and out buttons so that you can zoom out to see a more regional view or zoom in to see more park details such as buildings, fields and trails. More embedded maps will be coming to other content soon.
Did you know the portal has its own light weight version of iMAPS? It doesn't contain all the in-depth tax data as iMAPS, but it does show users the City attractions around an address (museums, parks, government offices, fire stations, police districts, etc) and lists the City services for an address (waste collection, recycling, CAC, council district, etc). Look for a non-mapping version of the City service information coming to the Neighbors and City Services landing pages soon.

Summer Web Activity

2011-06-13T09:10:00.000-04:00

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?

2011-06-10T12:36:00.000-04:00

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.

Press Releases

2011-05-23T11:17:00.000-04:00

In my previous post about Advanced Search I neglected to include Press Releases as an optional 'type'. Just as you can search within Documents, Minutes/Agendas, etc., you can search within Press Releases. Public Affairs has started to post the PDF versions of Press Releases to the site.

Search Changes

2011-05-19T12:55:00.000-04:00

Within the last few weeks we have implemented some changes to search. We changed the search crawl method from file-based to URL-based as mentioned in a previous post. Why?

Google has some 180+ factors that comprise their search algorithm. Their URL-based search uses all these to determine the results while the file-based search only used a small portion. The URL-based search maximizes the search logic and most closely resembles google.com search.
The URL-based search starts at the main page then spiders its way through all the linked pages to determine all the content. The file-based search indexed all our content and documents, linked or not. The URL-based allows us to provide more relevant returns that are actually linked from within the website.

What? You enjoy all the nitty-gritty details within agendas, minutes and other documents?
Relax, we knew some of you existed! When we changed from file to URL-based search we also added an Advanced Search.

The Advanced Search provides two main levels of functionality:

As with most advanced searches, it allows you to craft the search by including words, excluding words, searching exact phrases or having at least one word. If you love queries, structured logic and boolean operations...you will be in heaven.
You get to select what 'type' of content to search within. Some of these types are actually doing the file-based search to find the content. The types and details:

All -- URL-based -- searches all linked content
Articles -- URL-based -- searches all html content, no documents
Contacts -- URL-based -- searches just the staff contacts associated with content
Minutes/Agendas -- file-based -- searches all boards, commission and cac minutes, agendas and documents, no html files
Documents -- file-based -- searches all documents across all areas, no html files

The Minutes/Agendas has quite an archive of documents...

Appearance Commission, 2002 to current
Arts Commission, 2004 to current
Board of Adjustment, 2001 to current
Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission, 2009 to current
Budget & Economic Development Committee, 2001 to current
City Council, 2000 to current
Citizen Advisory Councils, current agendas
Comprehensive Planning Committee, 2001 to current
Historic Cemeteries Advisory Board, 2009 to current
Law & Public Safety Committee, 2001 to current
Parks Recreation and Greenway Advisory Board, 2002 to current
Mordecai Historic Park Advisory Board/Parks Committee, 2006 to current
Planning Commission, 2003 to current
Passenger Rail Task Force, 2010 to current
Public Works Committee, 2001 to current
Raleigh Historic Districts Commission, 2002 to current
Raleigh Transit Authority, 2005 to current
Zoning Public Hearings, 2001 to current

If you use the Advanced Search or have thoughts on the change to the main search...let us know. Comment here...feel free to start the dialogue.

Isn't the weather great?

2011-04-07T16:36:00.000-04:00

Well, we can usually say that in Raleigh. Since our weather is one of the many things that makes Raleigh a great place to live, we decided to promote the temperature and conditions on the portal. The weather portlet links to the National Weather Service.

Did something else catch your eye? Perhaps it was the scrolling alerts. We isolated a set area to house all the alerts, be it 3 or 10. The alerts scroll through stopping when you move your mouse pointer into the region. You can't miss them now.

You may also notice some in page links on some of your favorite pages. We have pushed out a revision to some of the templates within our Content Management System. The changes make section headings a bulleted hyperlink list at the top of the page so you can jump to the section of interest. We have found this helpful on many of our long pages that cover FAQs, bus routes and similar.

More to come....we have some updates to search coming as well as some other usability changes. Search will also be getting an 'advanced search' option for those people who like to really maximize their search query. It will allow a user to just search specific types of documents and well as including or omitting terms from the search.

Recent, Current and Future

2011-03-11T13:09:00.000-05:00

Recently, February 24, the Citizen Advisory Group met to discuss results of the last usability test and identify new pain points. Thanks to those who could attend. Most of the conversation centered around the Parks information on the site and ways to improve it ranging from content organization to presentation. RTN content was also discussed briefly and that content is currently being reviewed and enhanced. It was noted that any major City project should be displayed on the site, so the current traffic signal upgrade should be posted. The common look among the department pages could even be taken a step farther by standardizing the imagery to be more graphical than pictorial.
The Citizen Advisory Group will continue to meet on a quarterly basis, just after the usability studies are conducted and evaluated. These meetings are open to anyone, check back in April for the next scheduled meeting.

Currently, City staff is conducting search testing. While still using the Google Search Appliance (GSA), we have a test site that utilizes a web crawl method to search. This method is most like the algorithms used on the google.com site. The current portal search method is file based. Staff will be comparing the two methods over the next two weeks to determine if a change should be implemented. Check this blog for results from the testing and the next steps.

Looking ahead to the near future, April, we will be conducting our next usability test. The subject matter for the next test will be Parks and Recreation information. If you would like to participate in the test, which will require about an hour of your time and physical presence, email us. Or, if you would like to suggest a usability test case concerning the Parks and Recreation information, email us as well. The Parks and Recreation information is by far one of the most popular and frequently accessed.

Did You Notice?

2011-02-23T13:49:00.001-05:00

We released some small changes today, did you notice? The changes were a result of the Usability Tests and should be fairly subtle in nature. If you like a challenge, see if you can find the 17 changes, but stop reading now because they will be mentioned later in this post. The goal is to make small changes to enhance the user experience frequently. Some changes may be more noticeable than others.

Behind the Scenes Changes
Some changes were substantial but hopefully you won't notice these at all. The initial launch had far too many CSS stylesheets. While making some of the other changes, we used this opportunity to collapse all the CSS styles into one file. This was a very tedious task, but one that needed to be done to move forward.

Using the Data
When we outlined the I Want To lists for the main and landing pages before the launch, we relied on staff's working knowledge of content people request. The design called for a consistent look across the landing pages, but we have realized if items look too consistent, the changes may go unnoticed. We are using the site analytic data and user feedback to customize the I Want To lists. The first landing pages to get revised I Want To lists are Arts & Parks and Public Safety. The others will be revised soon.

Finally...the Changes

Calendar, Maps and Directory moved to upper left for increased visibility
Department dropdown list moved to upper left for increased visibility
Search moved to upper right, a typical search field location
Alerts background image removed for visual clarity
Alerts icon added to draw attention
Alerts text color changed to match other hyperlinks on site for visual association
Most Popular moved to bottom right to balance other changes
Most Popular defaults to searches
City of Raleigh News items list is one column rather than two columns to make titles more readable
Blue background color removed from landing page secondary articles
Removed survey from content pages to reduce visual clutter
Removed Connect With Us from content pages to reduce visual clutter
Moved Alerts above Related Info on content pages to keep Alerts prominent
Text changed to black/bold on Related Information headers to improve readability
Calendar enlarged
Calendar uses more Google Calendar native functions like clickable entries, map addresses, copy to my calendar
Employment listings are alphabetized for readability

Web Usability Group Meeting

2011-02-16T10:10:00.000-05:00

The Web Usability Group is meeting Thursday Feb. 24, 2011 from 4:00pm to 5:30pm.
The meeting will be held in the Raleigh Municipal Building (222 W. Hargett St) in Room 305. If you are interested in sharing your opinions and ideas about the City's portal, please join us. If you have questions, please email.

Survey says...

2011-02-11T08:28:00.000-05:00

Now you can know what the survey says. The first version of the online user survey just accepted your selection. The second version displayed the text results of the survey after you cast your vote. The latest rendition displays the results in graph and text format. The online survey provides an insight into public opinion on various topics facing the City. We have used the survey to gather public views on some of the recent decisions facing staff and Council like the smoking ban in City parks and the results of the Crabtree Valley Transportation Study. Take the survey and each time you return you will see the latest results. It does rely on cookies to keep track, so if you clear your cookies, you won't see the results. Share you opinions...and see what others think!

The GSA Landed...

2011-02-08T10:31:00.000-05:00

Our infrastructure team may have thought something landed in their network rack when amidst all the black and silver sea of clones appears a bright yellow Google-stamped box. The interloper is a welcomed addition to the Web Portal search. The GSA (Google Search Appliance) replaced the SOLR search engine on our Web Portal in early January.

The Basics
The GSA has some great native capabilities, aside from being a proven leader in search engines. It is smart enough to suggest spelling corrections if you mistyped something. It makes use of the faceted search tags within our content. It will even give some of its own suggestions after you search for a term. Like google.com, it indents results that come from the same domain, or in our site case, from within the same content area. If you want to see more from a specific content area, just click the 'More Results from' hyperlink.

The Document Gotchas
The SOLR search engine was configured to use friendly document titles that our content contributors entered in the Content Management System. The GSA, like all other web search engines, relies on the document title property that is within the file itself. Most people probably don't pay close attention to the title properties in their documents and many free PDF conversion software takes great liberties in populating these for the new PDF. In short, we tried to clean up and populate as many document titles as we could before GSA went live, but we could not get them all. You may see a cryptic document title returned in search if we have not gotten to it yet.

If you were accustomed to searching for DXF and DWG files in the old search, you won't be able to pull these files in the GSA search. It doesn't support these types, but, you will still find the pages that list all these files with links to the documents.

We are not short on any old documents so we zipped up some of the archival documents ZIP files. The GSA doesn't search into the ZIP files or provide friendly titles like the previous engine, so the ZIP files may seem a little different. We plan to implement an advanced search option that will allow people to look for archival documents, forms, press releases, etc.

Ready, Set, Search
If you haven't tried the new search on the Web Portal, try it out! If you search for something and just can't find it, let me know. We could be missing content that you find valuable. We could be using words and terminology that differ from the public's wording. Whatever the circumstance, we want you to the find the information you need!

Web Usability Test

2011-01-28T14:09:00.001-05:00

Thanks to all who participated in the recent web usability test. We learned from the opportunity to watch people step through our four test cases. What did we learn? In a short, people are not seeing the items in the right column...the employee directory, the events calendar, and the alerts go unnoticed. We documented some other observations as well, but more importantly, we used the usability test information to guide some changes that are coming.
Like...shuffling the search box and calendar/maps/directory/departments portlet...revising the alerts portlet so it is more visible...enhancing the calendar. These changes are coming in the next couple weeks! We implemented the Google Search Appliance earlier this month but more on that in another post.
We want to conduct more usability tests in the future but we need you. If you are interested in participating in one of our future studies, email us with your contact information. Read the study results and observations...

Volunteers Wanted

2011-01-06T16:28:00.000-05:00

We need a few volunteers to assist us with a usability study for the web portal. It will be Friday, January 14, 2010 during the day at the Raleigh Municipal Building (downtown). We will only need an hour of your time but it will provide us with valuable information. We will schedule a time for us to observe you perform 3-4 simple tasks on the web portal. We will record your keystrokes, mouse movement and commentary. If you would like to volunteer or know someone who would, email us today!
Thank you...and we have more to come in 2011.

Web Usability Group

2010-11-29T15:26:00.000-05:00

On November 17th, the Web Usability Group met for the first time to discuss the City's Web Portal. The group is comprised of citizens and City staff. The goal is to utilize the input and opinions from the group to help improve the City's Web Portal. At the first meeting, the group identified three key areas for usability testing:

People finding contact information
People finding City meeting information
People finding inspection, permit, building information

The Web Usability Group:

Who reinvents the wheel?

2010-11-04T21:29:00.000-04:00

OK, we may have tried. With excellent, proven wheels already available, we got one.
We are currently working on configuring a Google Search Appliance to provide the portal search functionality. We will still have facets. We will get the very capable Google search algorithm.We will get the helpful 'did you mean...' when your typing fails you. We will get a search that learns from what people select. We will get a search that finds related articles.
In short, you will get search functionality that you have come to know and enjoy.

Don't Forget About the Right

2010-10-15T12:25:00.000-04:00

The right side of the web page that is...

Every content page has a Related Information section in the right column. This section contains links to documents, contacts, schedules, additional pages and more. We re-styled the area to make it clearer and more visible.

If you see something missing in the Related Information section for a specific page, let us know.

News Items Get Dates

2010-10-15T12:15:00.001-04:00

We heard it would be helpful if the news items had publish dates.

RSS enabled

2010-10-15T12:11:00.000-04:00

The news items on the main page are now available via RSS feeds. Click on the link to start receiving the news!

Welcome...

2010-10-08T16:12:00.000-04:00

Launching a new web portal and content management system in less than a year was a huge undertaking, of that, we were aware. When we launched Raleigh’s new portal August 2010, we knew it wasn’t perfect. As with any design project, we could have continued changing, updating and revising…never reaching perfect and delaying the launch.

We went live.

We have heard a lot of feedback, some positive, some constructive and some great ideas. We have been listening to all of it, and we have implemented some changes and we still have more to come. We hope to use this forum to communicate our site changes and gather constructive feedback for future changes.

Recent Changes:

Back by popular demand…the department list dropdown. Located in the upper right corner is a short cut to a specific department’s page. If you already know the department you want…go there.
Search improved…the search was horrible at the start. It wasn’t behaving as scoped and was pulling old content that very few people wanted to access. We have reworked the search and it is better, but we are not finished here.
Current Council Agenda is located on the main page below the news headlines.
Parks and Recreation have been creating individual facility pages.

Did you notice:

Most Popular in the bottom left...it contains the top pages, documents and searches which are coming directly from our site analytics.
Maps in the upper right…want to know your police district, recycling day or polling place? Want to see nearby schools, parks or libraries? Enter your address, get this and more.
Related Information along the right side…content pages have links to associated documents, forms, web sites and contact information.

In the works:

Adding dates to the News headlines on the main page.
CSS changes to make the site more uniform and readable.
Changing the site search to a Google Search Appliance to bring a more familiar search interface to the site
Upgraded “News” functionality with more RSS feeds for your particular interest
A mobile-friendly view of the website
Some “under the hood” improvements…like an upgrade to our JBoss and Alfresco platforms

We want to hear from you. What is something you’ve tried to find lately on the web portal but were not able to?