ARB's Public Website Survey - Background / History
This page last reviewed November 2, 2009
The CARBIS (California Air Resources Board Information System) Committee, made up of
representatives
from all ARB Divisions, concluded in 2007 that since the Governor's new templates would
result in
major changes to our existing environment, this would be the optimum
time to
survey our stakeholders to see what other website changes were needed.
Our statistician designed a survey along with the Committee.
For each
area of the survey, we solicited narrative comments and in addition to
the
responder’s ranking of each aspect of the site: search engine,
navigability,
clarity, completeness, etc. We purchased a $99 three-month
contract with
Zoomerang to host our survey and provide us with the resulting raw
statistics
and associated comments. The survey was linked from our
public website homepage
(www.arb.ca.gov)
for one month in
March-April 2007. A link soliciting stakeholders to complete
the survey
could also be found on the footer accompanying every list serve
broadcast
issued during that one-month period.
In October 2007, the Committee generated its "draft" analysis
of
the results and posted these on our Intranet for comment.
From the
subsequent ARB staff comments received during this one month comment
period, we
generated a so-called "final draft." We placed the survey,
the
statistics and comments, and the analysis on the public website.
The analysis includes a two-page Executive Summary
which has been
updated multiple times since October, 2007. We call this a
"living
document" as we intend to update the Executive Summary as items are
added
or completed. In
some instances, a major
item is completed and thereby noted in red.
In other cases, the policy decisions have been worked out and
documented,
but the heavy lifting has yet to be done. By "heavy lifting"
we
refer to the manual updating of individual webpages. These
items are
referenced in blue.
In January 2008, we received a second analysis of our website
which validated the results of the 2007 survey.
In early Summer 2009, we re-issued essentially the identical survey. By this time, we had our new left-hand column navigation bars to improve navigability, Google-compliant metatagging, easier access to videos, more concise top level pages requiring less reading, and many other system improvements. Certainly, search engine problems and navigability of ARB's website were our primary areas of focus, and we did a lot of work on this. Alas, we scored about the same in each of the survey areas and in some instances, we scored a bit lower. We notice that the survey participant demographic had changed as we issued the survey during a period of considerable registration activity for drayage trucks, transport refrigeration units (TRUs or "reefers') and diesel off-road equipment. These new registration requirements appear to have brought in many new users of the website, who visit us for the sole purpose of registering their diesel equipment.
Needless to say, we have more to do to satisfy our stakeholder
community and particularly those users who come to the website only to
register equipment. The survey's executive summary points the
direction to
future changes to the website.
If you have any thoughts on any of this, please contact our webmaster or call (916) 322-3260.
