Jeff L. Thigpen Register of Deeds: Guilford County New Web Site Design.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Guilford County New Web Site Design.

Scott Redmon's doing a great job moving Guilford County's website into the 21st century.

Also, Register of Deed's site.

24 Comments:

The new site design and navigation is much improved. The site's home page breaks about every rule there is in professional web design. Guilford County cannot and should not break both WC3 and ADA standards; it's a bad policy. Just like you'd have ramps for wheelchair users, you should have an ADA compliant site.

Tell him to put a DOC TYPE in for starters. And the home page is 31K which is about 2-3x the normal dose. Those poor poor dialup users.

By Anonymous, at 8:13 PM
I'll pass it on!

By Anonymous, at 2:12 PM
As for the DOC TYPE entry you may need to look closer. I've been told it is in there and complies with the standard…

The ADA compliance is on the radar screen, but requires a second type site built and will take time from what I understand.

By Jeff L. Thigpen, at 3:14 PM
I do see the DOC TYPE now; could have been my mistake. Sorry.

ADA compliance does NOT require a second site. It requires a good first site.

The drop-down menu, which is javascript, is lovely, but probably isn't able to be read by search engines. Not sure; that's a Macromedia command and I'll check on the SEO implications.

Don't get me wrong: I think it's a very pretty site and MUCH improved on the other one. I think it's "code-heavy," and almost every "alt" tag is empty - that's a big part of why it's not ADA compliant. (It's poor coding, too.) That simple fix would get you well on the way toward ADA compliancy.

Please go to this link to see the many ways the home page fails validation:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fgcms0004.co.guilford.nc.us%2F
(may require some work to copy & paste that link)

Did Guilford County already pay for this? IMO, it's not finished.

Keywords are really poor:
...meta name="Keywords" content="guilford county, north carolina, commissioners, government, egov, bid requests" /...

There is no description metatag I found.

The page title is this:
...title...Guilford County, North Carolina | Welcome.../title...

It really should say something like "Guilford County North Carolina Official Guilford County Government Web Site" or similar.

Those words should be repeated in the 'welcome' text as well. Search engines don't see images (it's a fairly image-heavy home page.)

There aren't any "title" tags so it's not really taking advantage of current HTML standards and doesn't show up in non-IE browsers. All-browser compliancy is a big deal, IMO.

The informamtion display is significantly improved and the site will benefit citizens; however, the site should be as good as it looks and it's not yet. Please get the graphic/web designers to finish the job.

By Anonymous, at 4:58 PM
I'll pass it on...

By Jeff L. Thigpen, at 7:07 PM
At least the County is working with a local designer. Yes, more work to be done perhaps, but a vast imrpovement and the money is staying in our community.

By Roch101, at 5:20 PM
It is a local designer/programming firm, isn't it?

By Anonymous, at 8:56 PM
Nope. Scott Redmon, County Web Analyst, designed the look and feel of the site, and Bill Bailey (until recently, Webmaster for the County) helped with the "back end" (scripting & database) work.

By Anonymous, at 1:49 PM
We fully understand that the alt tags, descriptions, keywords, etc are missing at this time....we are working on completing that as quickly as possible...you have to understand that we had to quickly address a problem and get a solution in place...the site that you currently see was built to allow for easy updating of content...the old site was being hand-coded using html and required day to day mainteance just to keep content flowing.......therefore not allowing future development and initiatives to be made..........

The site that is currently there will also be changed again in the near future once all the county departments have the opportunity to get their own website built...the alt tags, descriptions, etc....are being placed within the site once that phase of development is dealt with...

be patient..

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Jeff L. Thigpen Register of Deeds

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Guilford County New Web Site Design.

24 Comments:

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