About The Website
The redesign of the League of Women Voters Website was released in July of 2009. The primary purposes of the redesign were to improve its standards compliance, usability for members, appearance, and usability for administrators.
Standards Compliance
The new site has been designed for greater compliance with the W3C standards. While far from perfect, most of the pages should validate with merely warnings rather than actual errors. Also this version has, in large part, separated "form" from "function" by using CSS which leads us to...
Accessibility
The previous version of the site was not designed with Accessibility in mind. We are currently working toward compliance with the various Accessibility protocols. In addition to the standard "skip navigation" links for use with text-readers such as "JAWS," we also added buttons to adjust the font-sizes throughout the site.
User-Interface and Layout
Bridging the border from usability to appearance, we have simplified the layout and, in many cases, have reduced the number of clicks needed to browse to the information you are looking for. We have also made the layout much more consistent.
Design
We have modernized our color scheme from the previous earth tones to brighter and "friendlier" colors to bring the site more in line with the LWVUS site.
Administrators
Finally, we have made a number of the pages database-driven. Rather than needing to update HTML on a webpage, they can now update these pages via a web-form. This allows them to make more frequent updates and will reduce the number of broken links.