You Are Here: 2007 NYS Webmasters' Guild "Best of the Web" Award Winners
State Government
Department of Environmental Conservation
NYSDEC's Public Website
http://www.dec.ny.gov 
Site Information
- Date Launched: May 4, 2007
- Approximate Number of Monthly Unique Visitors: 9.2 million in 2006
- Site Developers: Agency staff, system integrator (contractor), public volunteers
Summary and Background
NYSDEC unveiled its newly designed website on May 4, 2007. It greatly improves usability for the public by organizing information by topic instead of by bureaucratic structure. It is designed to provide accessibility for all users and be compliant with all NYS OFT Technology Standards and Guidelines. The new website also has additional usability tools such as geographic map indicators for content applicability in the state, program-specific contact information on every page (including address, phone number and email address), an alphabetical subject index of major topics, improved search engine functionality, and breadcrumb navigation aides. The website is faster loading and more cross-browser compatible. Response from the public has been overwhelmingly positive with the changes.
NYSDEC's public website, containing more than 35,000 files, provides accurate and timely information about environmental topics and regulatory programs to almost 10 million visitors annually. The site was in desperate need of a redesign in both "look and feel" and, more importantly, information architecture. The old website navigation mirrored the agency's bureaucratic structure which made it extremely challenging for the public to find necessary information. Updates to existing content and posting of new information consisted of 37 steps in a manual process, requiring extensive user training in HTML coding and accessibility standards. This was a very resource-intensive way to manage a large and complex website which is mandated to provide regulatory and legal information to the public. The RedDot Web Content Management System was purchased to streamline content creation and workflow processes.
The agency's webteam used a variety of methods to determine how best to reorganize the website navigation. Website usage reports and site survey results from the previous four years provided general trends of how visitors navigated through the website. Volunteers from the public were solicited to provide specific input on how the new navigation should be organized. A focus group from the general public met with NYSDEC's webteam to categorize significant environmental topics and issues using a card sorting exercise. Additionally, input was gathered from the entire agency staff at multiple steps in the process, including topic information organization and design components.
Once a new website navigation was finalized, web contributors throughout the agency (approximately 150 staff) assisted in cleaning up the existing content and identifying areas where additional content was needed to address new agency initiatives. The old website was broken apart and content was imported into the web content management system database. The content was assembled into the new website design, content cleaned up and posted to a new server with a more concise domain URL. The new NYSDEC website was released on May 4 with considerable outreach to direct the public and other partnering agencies to the new URL.
Technology Overview
NYSDEC purchased the RedDot Web Content Management System (WCM), along with the RedDot Web Compliance Manager. The WCM is a web-based tool available commercially. These two modules work together to streamline content creation and automate workflow processes, while ensuring content complies with acceptable web standards and maximizes accessibility compliance through rigorous validation criteria.
Prior to using the WCM, all the agency's content was hand coded and submitted by more than 150 agency staff to the webteam. The webteam would need to manually check for compliance with all NYSDEC's website standards, a combination of all OFT accessibility requirements and acceptable usability best practices. Combined, review of agency webpages entailed 37 separate steps and required contributors to know advanced HTML coding and extensive accessibility requirements. This meant very involved training plans to ensure staff proficiency.
The WCM allows content contributors to enter and approve content without knowing HTML coding. A simple word processing interface is used by the contributors and coding is done behind the scenes. Both the WCM and Compliance Manager were customized to incorporate accessibility requirements as mandatory processes within the interface. An example is needing to supply table summary, caption and title information before the webpage can be submitted in the system.
Code and accessibility requirements are automatically validated and rejected back by the system if errors occur, such as alt tags or meta information is missing.
Functionality
The goal of NYSDEC's public website is to provide timely and accurate information to the public in a fast-loading, user-friendly, and professionally appealing manner. Accessibility and usability were key cornerstones of our design approach and the NYS OFT Accessibility Standards were written into the implementation contract as mandates of the system integrator. Website design prototypes were created in-house and were required to address various accessibility and usability issues such as color blindness, vision and hearing impairment, cross-browser compatibility, download capability.
Efficiencies Associated with this Site
Moving to a WCM will save considerable resources, both time and money, for the agency. A conservative estimate is that 150 staff people throughout the agency contributed content for the public website in a given year. Each of these staff needed as least beginning and intermediate HTML training in order to contribute using our old manual process. Web content coordinators for each of the 35 different divisions required significantly more coding training, as well as in-house training for accessibility and NYSDEC website standards. At a conservative $169/training cost, significant resources were spent on training needs annually. Turnover of content contributors required additional training dollars, as well as valuable webteam resource time to explain the agency's website standards. Necessary software, such as code editors, validators and image editors, added to the financial cost. All design, maintenance and hosting of the website and project management is done in-house by agency staff. A system integrator partnered with us throughout the system implementation phase of the project.
Service to Customers
NYSDEC's public website grew from an initial 300 files to more than 35,000 files. From webmaster emails, our website survey results, and usage reports, we determined that although there was lots of information available, the public was having great difficulty in finding what they needed. Information needed to be organized in a manner that made sense to users outside the agency; a significant shift needed to occur to move from a bureaucratic content structure to a topical, subject-based approach. Volunteers from the public were asked to participate in helping to determine the most appropriate navigation approach. The result is a more intuitive organization of content to allow for easier navigation throughout the site.
Information is now grouped by activity or topic, and information has been pulled together to give users "one-stop shopping." All available forms on the website are listed in one location, as are types of permits, available publications and guidance/policy information.
Easier customer-service can be provided in a timely manner with the mandatory program-specific contact information on every NYSDEC webpage. This gives the public the right contact to answer their question, thereby improving agency responsiveness and making for a better customer interaction experience.
Contact:
- Cathleen Kittle
- Director, Bureau of Publications and Internet
- NYS Department of Environmental Conservation
- 625 Broadway- DPAE
- Albany, NY 12233-4500
- cskittle@gw.dec.state.ny.us
- (518) 402-8013