About Our New Site Design
Why redesign AlbanyCounty.com?
We receive a lot of feedback from our web visitors telling us that they like the wealth of material available on AlbanyCounty.com. We also receive feedback telling us that the information is sometimes too difficult to locate, or to find a second time. So we decided we needed to come up with an easier way for our web visitors find what they’re looking for.
To start with, we’ve redesigned our welcome page, and included links to brand-new portal pages that will make it easier to find the material you’re looking for on our current site.
Our next phase, to be completed in 2008, will be to “overhaul” all of our internal web pages to make them even more useful to you.
What’s changed on AlbanyCounty.com?
Besides our new, less-cluttered look, we’ve made a few changes to site navigation.
Portal Pages
From our welcome page, you can quickly access one of several portal pages that are organized to better help you find the program, service or other information you are looking for:
- Living & Working contains links to all the material on our site that we offer to help you in your daily life;
- Doing Business contains links to resources for our vendors & businesses;
- County Government has all the links and information you need to connect with the government of Albany County;
- Around Albany is a great place to start for visitors, or for residents looking for more information about the County;
- Historical Albany is a completely new page, celebrating our 300+ years of rich history.
Notices, Headlines, Updates, Favorites
On the right-side of our welcome page is a column containing headlines for the latest news and notices from Albany County government. There’s also a list of user favorites, and a new list of our most recent updates, to help you keep up-to-date. At the top of each list you'll see the word "more" — click to go to a page with even more items under that topic along with summaries.
Text Size Options
On our new welcome page and portal pages, you will see a new feature to allow you to adjust the size of the text on the page. Look for the letter "A" represented in three sizes, on the right side of the page immediately below our page banner. Your choices are small, medium and large. Right now your selection will only change the text size on certain pages on our site. Soon we will be adding this option to all of our web pages.
Here's a useful fact: You can also find text size options under the "View" menu at the top of your browser window. (Opera users should look for "Zoom" under the view menu.) Some websites don't allow you to alter the text size this way, but many do, including AlbanyCounty.com. So if you want very large, you can combine our largest text size, with an increased size selected from your browser's View menu.
What happened to...?
Departments List
You can find a list of all our departments and their contact information by either visiting our County Government portal, or clicking the link County Directory at the bottom of our pages. You can also find our PDF phone directory from the new County Directory page.
Hot Topics
The "Hot Topics" category from our old front page is no longer necessary, as you will find all the same links under our more useful "Latest Updates" and "User Favorites" categories.
Google Custom Search
We’ve also started to use the popular Google search engine to let you search AlbanyCounty.com. This gives you the familiar interface and results list that you’re used to seeing with Google, in addition to allowing for more flexible searches in case of misspellings or other uncertain search terms.
How Can I Let You Know How Much I Love Your New Design?
OK, we know we aren't perfect. Please email our webmaster if you find something you think we could improve. This includes bad hyperlinks, confusing language or layout, missing information, incomplete information, and so on. Don't forget we also like to hear positive feedback!
