http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/

Suburbanite Wrote:
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> http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/


Wow, welcome to early 2005 site design. Cutting edge, I must say!

Sure, this is a newspaper website, but this is at least late 2007/early 2008 design. (Though I would have gone with a less-dark background in the content cells.maybe a really light blue or grey) (forgot to post the link:) http://www.washingtontimes.com/



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/12/2008 11:17PM by Bob.

Yea! Finally they purchased the Google search engine.

http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/search?q=&btnAdvance=Advanced+Search&site=default_collection&client=default_frontend&output=xml_no_dtd&output=xml_no_dtd&proxystylesheet=default_frontend&access=p&getfields=*&entqr=0&lr=lang_en&ud=1&proxycustom=%3CADVANCED%2F%3E

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fairfaxcounty.gov&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
Result: 149 Errors, 15 warning(s)


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

Gravis Wrote:
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> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww
> .fairfaxcounty.gov&charset=(detect+automatically)&
> doctype=Inline&group=0
> Result: 149 Errors, 15 warning(s)
>
>


THe first two mistakes are totally novice shit.

Did they hire some high school kid who's only experience is setting up a blog on blooger or wordpress?

Google.com

Result: 73 Errors, 13 warning(s)

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.606

wazh? Wrote:
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> Google.com
>
> Result: 73 Errors, 13 warning(s)

the difference is that google have valid reasons: speed and bandwidth. fairfax county's site isnt about to get millions of hits a day. also, google sends an optimized page based on your client type and version, so even though they stray from standards, it's guaranteed to work.

google's homepage size: 21.1KB
fairfax county's homepage: 409.4KB


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/13/2008 03:46PM by Gravis.

It looks like a DotNetNuke site

Actually, I took another look at the home page and it doesn't look like a circa-2005 site, it looks like a circa 1999 or 2000 site.

Can anyone remember the last time they saw the 25/50/25% layout, with a menu on the left margin?

Ooh, you can collapse the left menu! (so why didn't they just default it to collapsed to at least try to keep the page less cluttered? Just doing that improves the page's appearance and usability by about 10 to 15%.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/13/2008 09:36PM by Bob.

A 25/50/25 three column is standard on Dotnetnuke site and a host of CMS packages.

It looks like a programmer did the site and they didn't pay for any art work. I can see having some inside pages with not much art, but some high dollar graphics from an excellent graphic designer on the front page would really improve the site.

I think the other part is that header graphics are a little blurry. Looks like they were rendered on some low end graphic software.

As for bandwidth, if you have the right graphics software you can produce very high quality graphics at very low k. Graphics and bandwidth shouldn't be an issue.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/15/2008 10:04AM by Lurker..

I think it looks fine, but then I expect a website like this to be efficient and easily navigable instead of sexy. It's not like they're competing with Prince William or Arlington for site hits or anything.