Agenda - 04-24-2007-7b - Laserfiche WebLink

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Progress to Date Information Technologies, with input from departmental web administrators, has developed a template, identified software tools, created processes and established a support system for addressing the issues of the web site. Information Technologies staff, with departmental web administrators and input from the UNC's School of Information and Library Sciences, have worked to re-architect the County's web information into a service based framework. Statistics • We have converted 17 departmental web sites over to the new template. • We are in the process of finalizing 7 additional departmental web sites. • We have initiated the planning stages of converting one other departmental website.. • We designed and implemented SmartSearch, a targeted search engine that now handles two-thirds of all web searches on the County's website. Results The public now benefits from the improved web pages in the following ways: • Accessibility -New web pages are compliant with accessibility standards established by the ADA, the World Wide Web consortium and other standards bodies for web design. The new pages load quickly, even on dial-up lines, and information can be translated from English to other languages efficiently when citizens use 3~d party automated translation tools. Unified design -New web pages follow a consistent and controlled design standard, which helps the public locate information and services efficiently and reliably. Navigation is the same from department to department. Colors, fonts and layout are consistent across departments using the template and toolset. This consistency also helps establish a brand identity. Central control of style -New web pages reference a small set of files, called "style sheets" that define the pages' appearance, such as colors, fonts, placement of elements and other attributes of the web pages' look and feel. The style of the website can be changed quickly and easily throughout all new web pages with simple changes to these central style sheets. • Efficient update mechanism -The combination of the authoring tool set, template, authoring policies, and technical support ensures that departments can easily maintain their information with minimal training. By putting content maintenance in the hands of departmental experts, they can more efficiently and directly maintain their information. Department experts can focus directly on the information, not on the web coding or the design elements, both of which are managed by the Information Technologies department. Service orientation -The new template and authoring policies are designed to yield web pages that are organized by services, rather than reflecting the internal organizational structure. This allows the public to find what they need very quickly. It also positions the County well for web-based services that cut across departmental boundaries.