The homepage is built around a menu of four sub-portals or portlets that provide information and interactive Web services. Portlets offer links to information and other information relevant to county and other government Web sites and cover topics such as business resources, culture and leisure, residents and government.
"We believe that the portlets are one of the key differentiators about our site," said Ivan Galic, chief of the Enterprise Applications Division at the Department of Technology Services. "We've provided multiple ways to the ultimate destination, and the portlets allow users to drill down into areas of interest instead of having to navigate the entire site to find information. For example, a resident clicks on the 'resident' link and it brings he or she to a page of topical relevance and so forth."
The portlets are only a small part of many other unique features offered on the site. It offers over 20 interactive Web services, including the ability to pay property taxes and parking tickets, reserve ball fields, register for recreation classes, renew library materials, report streetlight outages and potholes, obtain status information on constructions permits and more.
The overall portal -- which operates on about a $500,000 annual budget with funds contributed from other departments -- was designed using pre-defined templates that include files, scripts and style sheets that enable users in departments to integrate their content and Web services with minimal training and very little time spent on Web design.
The templates do the following: provide continuity and flexibility so that visitors experience the same look and feel throughout their experience; facilitate navigation that is set by the portal menu and the left navigation bar to ensure consistency in navigation throughout the site; create a well-defined directory or file structure that enables users to efficiently store content and share code; assign content to multiple portals by link, avoiding Web page duplication; and use Microsoft Active Server Pages to create the stability for the templates in accordance to industry standards.
Additionally, the site provides Federal Section 508 Web Accessibility for Persons with Disabilities. This compliance requirement is achieved through a graphic version of the site. The text version is created by the use of Active Server Page technology, allowing the county to actively read and filter content into a template that can be easily read by linear screen reader technologies. Subsequent updates to the graphic version are automatically posted to the text version.
As the project progresses into 2004, plans are in place to continue to move government programs online. "We're always looking to take things that are normally done via analog processes and make them digital," said Galic. "And we've had a lot of success in the county moving programs to the Web site. I think what you'll see is a stepped-up focus on internal business processes and Web enabling those applications."
