Quick review of Raleigh NC

This is a reprint of my article at http://spiritofcitywebs.com/node/60 that I did today.

Raleigh the capital of the state of North Carolina. Raleigh is known as the “City of Oaks” for its many oak trees. It is the second most populous city in North Carolina after Charlotte. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city’s estimated population on July 1, 2008 was 392,552, making Raleigh the 8th fastest growing city in the United States.

Raleigh operates under a council-manager government. The city council consists of eight members; all seats, including the mayor’s, are open for election every two years. Five of the council seats are district representatives and two seats are citywide representatives elected at-large. Historically, Raleigh voters have tended to elect conservative Democrats in local, state, and national elections, a holdover from their one-party system of the late 19th century.

http://www.raleighnc.gov/

is Designed as a

• Site is Slow
• Header with site Navigation and a navigation widget in the left corner. Widget is meant to classify customers in to a customer type and search
• fixed design
• News Section under navigation
• 3 column content
• left 156 px center 300px right 100%
• there is a footer
• this is a table design
• it has a CMS Guessing I believe the content management system to be PlumTree. Plumtree Software is a former software company founded in 1996 by product managers and engineers from Oracle and Informix with funding from Sequoia Capital. The company was a pioneer of extending the portal concept popularized by Yahoo! from the web to enterprise computing. BEA Systems acquired Plumtree on October 20, 2005, and Oracle subsequently acquired BEA. Plumtree’s former portal product continues as part of Oracle’s product line. http://www.plumtree.com/

• Primary Navigation

  News
  Services
  Current Projects
  Calendar
  Publications
  Forms
  Departments
  Employment
  Site Info

  Accessibility Extension — List of Accessibility Issues Summary

• Fail 1 — The page should contain at least one and no more than two h1 elements. Headings
• Fail 1 Data tables must use th elements to indicate header cells for the first cell in all the columns or rows. Data Tables
• Fail 1 For complex data tables, the td elements must have headers attributes that point to associated th header ids. Data Tables
• Fail 1 Each img element should have alt text. Images
• Warn 1 Every img element that is less than 8 pixels high or 8 pixels wide OR has an empty alt attribute value should be removed and CSS techniques should be used for styling content. Images
• Check 1 onChange event handler should not be used with the select element to cause a automatic change of focus or load a web page. Events
• Fail 1 A DOCTYPE declaration was not found. W3C Specifications
• Warn 1 The character encoding was not specified. W3C Specifications
• Fail 3 Each input element with type=text | password | checkbox | radio | file and each select and textarea element should either be referenced by the for attribute of a label element via its id attribute, or have a title attribute. Forms
• Fail 3 The b element must not be used to bold text content, instead use heading (h1-h6) elements for heading text or the strong element for emphasizing words, phrases or sentences. Text Styling
• Warn 3 One level of nesting. Use CSS properties instead of tables and nested tables to visually layout blocks of related content for graphical renderings. Tables
• Fail 4 Each focusable element with an onmouseover attribute should also have an onfocus attribute, and their associated event handlers should trigger the same or similar actions. Events
• Fail 4 Each focusable element with an onmouseout attribute should also have an onblur attribute, and their associated event handlers should trigger the same or similar actions. Events
• Fail 4 The font and center elements must not be used for text styling, instead use structural markup should be used with CSS for styling. Text Styling
• Warn 5 Ensure that links that point to different HREFs use different link text. Links
• Warn 9 If the content of the alt attribute is not empty it should contain at least 7 characters and less than 90 characters. The text should provide people who cannot see the image orientation to the content and purpose of the image in the website. Images
• Warn 16 Ensure that links that point to the same HREF use the same link text. Links
• Fail 21 Two or more levels of nesting. Use CSS properties instead of tables and nested tables to visually layout blocks of related content for graphical renderings. Tables
• Date: 7/7/2009 14:37 PM
  URL: http://www.raleighnc.gov/portal/server.pt?space=CommunityPage&cached=true&parentname=Login&parentid=0&in_hi_userid=2&control=SetCommunity&CommunityID=208&PageID=0

  No accessibility statement

  Search done by a Google appliance

  Departments Listing

  Administrative Services
  City Attorney
  City Clerk
  City Manager
  Community Development
  Community Services
  Convention and Conference Center
  Emergency Communications Center
  Finance
  Fire
  Information Technology
  Inspections
  Parks and Recreation
  Personnel
  Planning
  Police
  Public Affairs
  Public Utilities
  Public Works
  Solid Waste Services

  Type of Media

  video = http://www.raleighnc.gov/portal/server.pt/gateway/PTARGS_0_0_306_207_0_43/http;/pt03/DIG_Web_Content/category/Government/Raleigh_Television_Network/Cat-Index.html

  Note

  lot of information on the front page.
  Site is painfully slow and not very clean.
  Logo Soup on the left is mess and does not add to the design.
  Contact information is hidden why hide that? Phone number should be very handy.
  Table Design is not web standard and cause lots of problems.