Shaking up the idea of a state portal

Garp · 29-04-2013, 20:26

On Friday we got the go-ahead from the Governors office to launch the new state portal : http://portal.ehawaii.gov

We've tried to go away from the usual styles and approaches taken by various state portals, and hopefully shake things up a bit.

Everything is arranged into four simple categories, and we've tried to heavily focus on making navigation as intuitive as possible which has meant throwing out some preconceptions about how things should be. People don't really care all that much which department it is they need to contact about, say, getting camping permits. Nor should knowing be a requisite for buying one. They just want to get a camping permit! Unfortunately most portals are stuck dealing with competing political plays by various departments. We've been really lucky that both the Office of Information Management Technology (OIMT), the State CIO, and the Governors office have all had our backs on this huge overhaul. So much so that unlike any other government project we've ever been involved in, we got this from concept to production in just a few days under 2 months. Given we had to curate and overhaul all the content as well as design and test that's a phenomenal achievement. If we'd had to deal with the usual way a portal is designed and launched we'd probably be talking 9 months+.

On the tech front, if you'll excuse the buzz-word bingo: it's using an HTML5 based, mobile-first, responsive design (so it automatically provides the best layout for your devices resolution, and doesn't waste time downloading large content on small screens), that is touch-enabled and data driven.

All content is generated hourly from markdown format (same thing reddit uses for comments) into HTML by ruby/jekyll, meaning our web-servers can just get on with presenting the site rather than trying to figure out what to present. It's quicker for users, and less resource intensive for my servers. It's also helped us enormously with rapidly prototyping the site and getting it into fit form for bringing live.

One of the awesome things behind it is that it's also got all of our design and content management team to use Git and they just love it. Version control all the things \o/

29-04-2013, 20:26	#1
Garp Preparing more tumbleweed Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Hawaii Posts: 6,038	Shaking up the idea of a state portal On Friday we got the go-ahead from the Governors office to launch the new state portal : http://portal.ehawaii.gov We've tried to go away from the usual styles and approaches taken by various state portals, and hopefully shake things up a bit. Everything is arranged into four simple categories, and we've tried to heavily focus on making navigation as intuitive as possible which has meant throwing out some preconceptions about how things should be. People don't really care all that much which department it is they need to contact about, say, getting camping permits. Nor should knowing be a requisite for buying one. They just want to get a camping permit! Unfortunately most portals are stuck dealing with competing political plays by various departments. We've been really lucky that both the Office of Information Management Technology (OIMT), the State CIO, and the Governors office have all had our backs on this huge overhaul. So much so that unlike any other government project we've ever been involved in, we got this from concept to production in just a few days under 2 months. Given we had to curate and overhaul all the content as well as design and test that's a phenomenal achievement. If we'd had to deal with the usual way a portal is designed and launched we'd probably be talking 9 months+. On the tech front, if you'll excuse the buzz-word bingo: it's using an HTML5 based, mobile-first, responsive design (so it automatically provides the best layout for your devices resolution, and doesn't waste time downloading large content on small screens), that is touch-enabled and data driven. All content is generated hourly from markdown format (same thing reddit uses for comments) into HTML by ruby/jekyll, meaning our web-servers can just get on with presenting the site rather than trying to figure out what to present. It's quicker for users, and less resource intensive for my servers. It's also helped us enormously with rapidly prototyping the site and getting it into fit form for bringing live. One of the awesome things behind it is that it's also got all of our design and content management team to use Git and they just love it. Version control all the things \o/ __________________ Mal: Define "interesting"? Wash: "Oh, God, oh, God, we're all gonna die"?