The county's CIO, Pat Groff, officially presented the portal to elected county officials in a public meeting in early April.
Groff said intense study, research and public participation -- including an online presentation of three different versions of the portal-- went into the portal's ultimate design.
Constituents and county employees were invited to select a favorite version; make comments about how the information was structured; the navigational categories; and the overall look and feel.
"We knew it wasn't a contest," he said. "It was mechanism to get to the fourth version."
The portal is a blending of the three options, based largely on the "Yahoo" look, and the online survey was key to the final product, said Diane Hartline, the county's PIO
"We had well over 500 responses," she said. "It was really valuable. Rather than [people] just clicking 'Yes' or 'No,' we got very detailed observations."
County officials also said a market analysis performed by the California State University, Sacramento and KPMG Consulting, Inc. -- the private sector partner of the project -- played a large role in the portal's development.
County officials learned that the ability to easily find a service along with contact information, such as an e-mail address and phone number, was what people wanted most. The portal presents information based on service categories, and, according to Hartline, this format will become the basis for future interactivity -- another feature people said they wanted.
The improved portal appears to be proving itself: Prior to 2002, the site logged approximately 320,000 monthly visits. That number catapulted to 900,000 in January and now averages approximately 600,000 hit per month.
Though the portal is the county's first high-profile enterprise project, Groff said it builds on work already done by county staff.
"I had been describing this as the fist leg of our journey, but it really is the second leg," he said. "We have some departments that had done some incredible things."
Groff also wants to use the portal to educate the county's residents.
"Many constituents don't have a high level of understanding about what the county does for them," he said. "I think the Web site will go a very long way toward changing that."
Sacramento County, with a population of approximately 1.3 million, is unique because of its high number of unincorporated regions.
"We provide a level of municipal services that are generally tied to a large city," Hartline said.
The site is also incorporating accessibility standards. Groff said access to information and services for persons with disabilities is a basic tenet of the design. His team's proposal that the site meet W3C level-one and level-two standards is currently under review by county officials.
The county IT department funded the site, and Groff said he is very reluctant to apply transaction fees to any of the county's services as online features grow.
"The idea of charging constituents for access to things on the Web is very slippery slope," he said. "We are not going to charge for improved access to government."
