The NYS Forum, Inc.

2006 NYS Webmasters' Guild "Best of the Web" Award Winners

State Government
NYS Department of Civil Service
Public Web Site

Site Information

Date Launched: February 22, 2006

Approximate Number of Monthly Unique Visitors: 115,000

Site Developers: The concept of using colors to cue site visitors about the overall site organization was created by a committee of Department employees as part of Commissioner Daniel Wall's Strategic Directions initiative. The concept was sent to MRB, a graphic design firm, who devised the color scheme and designed the Home Page and top level index pages. The Home Page design is largely intact, but Department employees radically redesigned the index pages during development. The actual development of page technology was designed and developed by Department staff. Over 30 Department employees participated in the development of content for the site.

Summary and Background

The Department of Civil Service proudly launched its new web site in February 2006. The site raises the bar for usability and accessibility with its customer-centric view, Cascading Style Sheets, semantic HTML mark up, integrated Google search, and ColdFusion pre-processing. The new site is attractive and light-weight, serving one-third fewer bytes of information per access compared to our old site. It has been described by one of our (formally) biggest critics as "one of the best examples of 'before' and 'after' I have ever seen."

Our web site had suffered from "organic growth syndrome." While it was well-organized in 2002 when it was last updated, many new features and applications had been added and did not fit the scheme well. Research indicates that web sites typically need revision every 18-24 months, and ours was no exception.

Visitors indicated that information on the site was difficult to find. We had added a search capability, but it was hard to locate and not terribly effective at pointing our visitors to the information they required. Despite our best efforts, our site had accessibility issues. The experience we offered our visitors was not the positive experience we intended.

The site was growing, and we were serving almost 69 billion bytes of information monthly. We had just replaced our hardware and were concerned that another upgrade would be necessary soon.

The web site redesign project was launched as part of Commissioner Daniel Wall's Department Review and Strategic Directions process. With the full support from the Commissioner on down, an inter-disciplinary team formulated policies and procedures to manage the content development of the web site.

A reporting structure was put in place: Content Developers who build pages work with Content Managers at the Division level. With coordination and approval ensured, Content Managers pass the information to the Webmaster, who, with the team, determines the placement on the page, ensures the pages meet state and Department standards, and physically publishes the page.

The Department rebuilt the web site without seeking additional funding. Once the initial design was completed (by a consultant), we used state staff exclusively by stealing cycles from their regular duties to pursue this vital venture. We made modifications to the design to address needs as they arose without returning to the consultant.

The Department Review team had primary responsibility for the project. One member, the head of the Web Development Unit, took responsibility for the management and development of the technical infrastructure needed to support the endeavor. The web development unit played an essential role in the creation of infrastructure, training and support for the content developers, and management of the page development. To manage the content development, we appointed a webmaster, who was vital in ensuring that the rewrite was completed on time.

The Department's efforts at designing a tight technical infrastructure resulted in pages with a high level of compliance with state standards, especially the state's standards for web site accessibility. While it is virtually impossible to remediate an entire site that serves well over 10,000 unique documents every month, we have worked hard on the top-level and most visited pages to ensure that every visitor, regardless of disability, has a positive and successful experience.

Link placement workshops with cross-discipline teams were the innovative key to universal buy-in. Support for the web site revision was strong across the Department. With a customer-centric design, there was the potential for in-fighting over content placement. Virtually none of this happened, largely due to the inclusive activities put in place to handle site design and layout. Formal training sessions in semantic mark-up and Dreamweaver aided the content developers at crucial times. These trainings were repeated throughout the life of the project.

Before launch, we enlisted the support of many of our heaviest users from outside the Department to view and comment on the web site. This review caught a few issues that we addressed, but for the most part, we were greeted with high praise.

In short, the Civil Service Public Web Redesign project was a model of collaborative effort: senior management, project managers, program specialists, technologists and users working together to deliver an outstanding product.

Technology Overview

Our web site is a combination of Cascading Style Sheets, semantic mark up and ColdFusion pre-processing. Most of our pages are created using custom templates in Dreamweaver:

• Cascading Styles sheets allowed us to create a web site that is lightweight, fast, attractive and accessible. The style sheets provide the branding that cues our customers as to the context of the current page.
• Semantic mark-up means that the HTML we choose represents the content and structure of the page, not how it looks. For example, we use "<h1>" and "<h2>" only for headers, and "<blockquote>" for quotes and not for indenting. This insistence on formal structure makes our pages much more understandable for people with disabilities, and allows pages to render cleanly regardless of browser. Our content providers benefit as well, because cleaner pages are much easier to create and maintain.
• ColdFusion pre-processing allows us to hide the complexities of the navigation from our developers, leading to very consistent pages across the site. We have turned the "<body>" and "<a>" tags into ColdFusion Custom Tags. Essentially, our content providers build standard pages. Our pre-processor generates the navigation and special handling for links. For example, with no effort on the part of our developers, our site will display icons following links that describe the type of page (PDF, Word document, Spreadsheet) and its size. Further, links that lead away from our site will have a special icon that so indicates. Again, the developer need do nothing; the underlying site technology does all the work.
• Dreamweaver templates simplify page creation and maintenance even more. Content providers start by choosing a template from a collection of standard layouts. Almost all effort goes into the content of the page, as opposed to the layout. Use of templates virtually guarantees a consistent look-and-feel to the site.
• We use the Google Mini search appliance to support the public site. Sub-collections are often handled using Verity, another full-text search tools that is well suited for small, well-defined collections of information.

Functionality

The new web site brings to bear virtually all the best practices for web site design developed over the last few years:

• Our content is divided into four realms by customer group. Job Seekers, Public Employees, Retirees and Human Resource Professionals. The presentation is heavily branded by style to indicate to the visitor the current realm.
• Information that does not fit readily into one of the customer realms is easily found from the Home Page.
• The site largely separates content from presentation by relying heavily on Cascading Style Sheets for its presentation. The styles are applied by realm, strongly supporting the overall organization of the site, and exposing it to the visitor. Reliance on style sheets simplifies the underlying content, making the web site more accessible to people using alternative devices, such as screen readers.
• Search has been integrated into virtually every page.
• Icons indicate a wealth of information about links: whether the link transports you to another web site, the type of document, the size of the referenced document, and more.
• Our footer, appearing on virtually every page, gives visitors easy access to our Frequently Asked Questions, Privacy Policy, features of the site, Site Map, Equal Opportunity Employer Policy and our Contact Us page. In addition, we provide a link to our feedback page, our accessibility statement, and our disclaimer.
• We have kept our navigation simple.
• Links on our index pages are supported by text that provides insight into the content behind the links.
• A clear "Skip to Content" link facilitates access for keyboard users, such as those with visual and motion impairments.
• We have broken up many of our long pages into well-organized collections of short pages. We find that with small pages, visitors are less likely to miss critical information located on the page, but not immediately visible.
• Sidebars grace many pages with links to supporting materials. For example, on our exam page, the sidebar provides links to our test guides. This format is consistent throughout the site.

Efficiencies Associated with this Site

By using Cascading Style Sheets for presentation, we have significantly reduced the size of the pages, and consequently the bandwidth required to serve those pages. Statistics show a reduction of 33% in the number of bytes we have served, despite a 20% increase in page requests. With this reduction in page weight, we can server up to 50% more content before reaching the bandwidth requirements of the old site. This savings will postpone our next server upgrade indefinitely.

Our content providers have found that developing pages in the new framework is easier, and much faster. By simplifying the page development environment, we have reduced our developers' reliance on technical assistance, and shortened each page's time to publication.

Service to Customers

The main beneficiaries are the visitors to our web site: Job Seekers, Public Employees, Retirees and Human Resource Professionals who can find the information they seek. With the publication of the new site, it is simpler than ever to conduct business with the Department online. Visitors can sign up for most of our examinations online, paying with a credit card when appropriate. They can view their battery scores, and take Training and Experience examinations online. The web has become our primary vehicle for disseminating information about upcoming opportunities. These features, and a wealth of other information, can now be located with ease.

We verified this before release by including our customers in the final testing of the web site. We used popular listservs to solicit beta testers. Our testers communicated with us through our Comment System, a custom-built software add-on that allowed visitors to comment on the page, and view the comments of other visitors. We organized the content (and continue to do so) by assembling cross-discipline teams and engaging them in intense workshops. These workshops are vital to the success to the organization of the content on the web site.

Our content providers also benefit, since pages are now easier and faster to create and maintain. We concentrated our training on the concepts of semantic mark-up, allowing our developers to increase their understanding of the application of new web development technology to the development of their pages. With our developers understanding of semantic mark-up, they are creating pages that render clearly, and improving the accessibility to their information. By largely divorcing presentation from content, we have allowed our providers to concentrate on the information they wish to convey, not how to convey it. With this new approach, our developers create pages more quickly and with less trouble, while yielding better pages.

Third, our web technical support staff benefits. Our content providers are more independent in the new environment, because we have made page development so much easier. We find that the level of support our technical staff must supply greatly reduced.

Contact:

Michael B. Short

Chief of Enterprise Development

NYS Department of Civil Service

Alfred E. Smith Office Building

Albany, NY 12239

(518) 474-1294

mb.short@cs.state.ny.us