Home

Department of Public Works

It is important to Remember that this is just a snapshot of time and that snapshot was take in September of 2008

To design a user interface or website design/layout it is necessary to understand the current design vocabulary used by people that are producing similar website for other cities. And what type of viewers will be likely to use this site. In this case it is for a division of a city's website call "the department of Public Works." I only include a city if it has a division that is call "public works" if the same services are in a different division or a city call a similar division to "public work" somthing else like utilities I don't include them here. I will look at them in a latter report.

The method in which this study was completed was to compare cities that have been judge to have successful websites and see how they layout the public works page and how they developed the navigation for their site and what application they have developed.

How was a site graded “successful”? The Municipality eGovernment Assessment Project (http://psigroup.biz/megap/) has developed benchmarks among cities nationwide. The study assesses e-government implementation across 55 different city functions and services and assigns each municipality an "e-score". This allows both a snapshot of the leading edge, an inventory of current e-government best practices.

Of the cites that were reviewed 25% did not use the term “Public Works” as a name for a department in that city. 20 cities were reviewed 10 with a similar population to Richmond, VA (200,123) and 10 with a much larger population. Similar population is 200,000 to 500,000 and larger was greater then 500,000.

Navigation Summery
The average site has 15 links with its primary navigation with 75% of the primary navigation is done from the left side 150px column, 20% is done from center column navigation, and 5% is done from the right 150px column.

Navigation Menu Item Ranking
All the primary menu items were collected and counted by menu name or function. Then listed by the count to show the popularity. Here is an example over the 20 sites there was 27 links that sent you to parking or traffic information for that city.

More than 10
Traffic/streets/parking/transportation services count 27
Refuse/Recycling/Trash/illegal dumping count 18

10
Contact Us/location count 10
Construction/project Management count 10
Special programs count 10

9
About Us count 9

8
Home count 8
Engineering Services Design/Construction count 8
Mapping/GIS count 8
Bid Invitations/ Bid Opportunities /contracting information/ RFP/RFQ count 8

7
Department Organization/ Divisions count 7

5
Frequently Asked Questions count 5
News Releases/ Highlights count 5

4
Street closers count 4
Flood/Stormwater Control count 4
Vehicle/ Fleet Services count 4
Sewers/water treatment count 4
Technical Library/ Standard Details and Specifications / Project Fact Sheets count 4

3
Boards & Commissions / Public Meetings count 3
Administration count 3

2
Meet the Director count 2
Capital Improvement Plan count 2
Snow and Ice count 2
Spanish/ Bilingual Assistance count 2
At Your Service/Service Request count 2
Links count 2
Report/remove Graffiti count 2
E-mail alerts count 2

1
Purpose Statement count 1
Land Development count 1
Quality Control count 1
Support Services count 1
Survey/Right-of-Way count 1
Street Lights count 1
Forms count 1
Press Releases count 1
Data Sales count 1
Facilities count 1
Education Program count 1
Transportation Services count 1
Race & Parade Permits count 1
Utility billing count 1
Requests for Proposals count 1
Fiscal count 1
Permits Online count 1
Environmental Services count 1
Facilities Management count 1
Operations and Maintenance count 1
Planning count 1
Property Management count 1
Infrastructure Management count 1
Street/Alley Cleaning count 1
Construction In Your Neighborhood count 1
Volunteer Opportunities count1
Residential Services count 1
Consultant Lists count 1
Beautification count 1
Current Air Quality Index count 1
Accomplishments and Initiatives count 1
Online Customer Service count 1
Report a Pothole count 1
FOIA Requests count 1
Municipal Regulations count1
Performancecount 1
Seasonal Leaf count 1
Street/Alley Cleaning count 1

6. Layout summery
Collecting all the links in the primary navigation of each site they were sorted by type or verbage of the link and counted. The list is sorted by that count.

Layouts

  • Header/left small/center large/right small/footer 45%
  • Header/left small/right large/footer 40%
  • Header/left large/right small/footer 10%
  • Header/center only/footer 5%

Gallery or picture application
None of the 20 websites had any type of picture library or gallery

Applications:
40 % of the Website had some type of e-service on the website they seem to fit in to three areas 1. mapping 2. workflow 3. notifications

7.Applications Ranking
All the links to applications were collected and counted by menu name or function. Then listed by the count to show the popularity.

  1. Reporting/work flow count 22
  2. mapping count 3
  3. Calendarcount 1
  4. Announcementscount 1
  5. Air Quality Index count 1
  6. email alerts count 1
  7. service information report view count 1
  8. Special Search count 1

8. Design Finding
Our current web presence or design is no more or less information, persuasive or entertaining then any other municipalities surveyed.

The median design which the City of Richmond uses with the “Header/left small/center large/right small/footer” design is closer to the average design that other cities use.
We should move away from the image map model that is currently being used and go to the more prevalent design that is used thought the site. Contact information is often lost on a page if it is on a page it will be helpful and build habit if we put contact information on every page and in the same place.

Content for the first page.
Duties of Public Works vary widely from city to city we should spend time spelling out not only what DPW does but where services that are “public works” like are located at in the City of Richmond website. For example several of the items that are DPU or General Services here are often public works in other cities. We should also address the importance of traffic and streets as it rated very high in what other city’s were trying to get out information about.
We should gauge the importance of citizen reporting to the mission of DPW and make that a stronger presence on the web site.

Content Review.
We should consider the rewriting content to apply to the newspaper press method of writing (what, where when, why and how) we currently use a outline method and it is difficult sometime to quickly answer the some questions like “why” someplace we do it well like for potholes (http://www.richmondgov.com/departments/publicworks/streetmaintenance.aspx) and others like leave collects we don’t (i.e. why do we worry about leave collection? )

E-Services Review
We currently do not offer any we should consider the importance of request for services apps, mapping apps like for street closers/maintenance/street cleaning, capital projects, safe routes home for elementary and middle school children, parking, urban forestry or vegetation. Email alerts for street closers by neighborhood.

Photo Gallery
No other public works department uses a gallery or slide show. The fact that pictures of any kind including for decoration are highly limited. With this in mind it might not be productive when determining resource usage to put a lot of work here. Photo blog of projects and photo aided newletters might be helpful, but “hi-end” presentation of photographic material maybe going in a direction that is different then the industry standard.
Areas that might be Helpful