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.

Press Releases

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

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?

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.