County government site

[msavard]

You all are such professional designers that I hesitate sharing my site here, but it might show what Processwire can do even for 'average' users.

I created this site with Processwire for the County of Ventura's Assessor's Office. It is a redo of the previous site done in ASP that was showing it's age. The goal was to provide a more modern design that would work with desktop or mobile while at the same time providing more features for the taxpayers to access data and communicate with us. While most of the County Government sites use WordPress (or similar) they graciously allowed me to give Processwire a try. I think it performs admirably, is easy to maintain, very fast, and actually fun to work with (most of the time....?).

http://assessor.countyofventura.org

Most of the site is handled by two main templates, one for the summary pages, and one for the detail pages. I also created a 'dummy' template to act as a folder to hold the pages for each category (to make a manageable hierarchy) . This made it easier for me to find things on the back end and mimics the front end nicely.

On the back end there are several templates that hold things like forms (pdf downloads), links, glossary terms, frequently asked questions, form responses, and more. All of these are dynamically included into the front facing pages based on their content and how they relate to the individual pages. 

Fillable forms were the hardest part for me. I tried working with some of the free modules for this sort of thing but I could never wrap my head around them. In the end, I just did it by hand with standard PHP forms combined with using the Processwire API to save the results to the database. It works fairly well but I'm sure there is a better way.

A big thank you to everyone on this forum for their help and tips both directly and indirectly, and to Ryan who makes this fabulous software available to us.

Any suggestions on the site are welcome.

 

[Jonathan Lahijani]

It's nice to see a ProcessWire site that's close to home!

[Jan Romero]

Looking good, however I can’t access it from Germany (connection times out) :O

[Nicolas]

Can't access the website from France neither ?

[szabesz]

No access from Hungary or many other places form the globe either. US and Canada based VPN access works. I suspect that only North America is allowed.

Edited September 7, 2023 by szabesz
VPN...

[msavard]

Interesting. I know IT blocks our office from getting out to foreign addresses, but I didn't know it went the other way. Thanks for trying to visit anyway. ?   

[DaveP]

No joy from the UK either. Unless one already subscribes to a VPN service and can therefore manifest a US IP, in which case, nice site.

[dragan]

Nice site, congrats!

Tip for everyone outside the US: Try visiting with the Tor browser. I could access it without problems from Switzerland.

re: forms
I can highly recommend the Pro module FormBuilder from Ryan. Well worth the money. 

[wbmnfktr]

Actually found the time to use a VPN to inspect that site (ProtonVPN, and TunnelBear VPN work great) now, and... I already have a complaint to file.

While the site overall seems perfectly fine, the header slider is super bad in my opinion.
Those topics seem quite important to possible website visitors, maybe even the only reason to look that site up, and those topics are somewhat hidden, while they could be a major navigational point/entry on the homepage or maybe even every page.

I'm not sure if this is the case but they sound quite important to me, and shouldn't be hidden in an element that doesn't even indicate it's a multi-topic/multi-element slider.

On the other hand it does seem to be super straight forward to get the things done.
I'm not sure what's exactly happening at each and every part of that site but compared to our german sites... few steps ahead.
At least compared my village (yes, only ~280 people around here) we still can't do things online. Besides complaining online forms don't work.

Jokes aside.

On 9/6/2023 at 7:27 PM, msavard said:

You all are such professional designers that I hesitate sharing my site here, but it might show what Processwire can do even for 'average' users.

 

I am not a designer and therefore really enjoy a functional website that does what it should. Therefore great work in most parts. At least for what I can tell.

[msavard]

Thanks for the feedback. I agree on the slider criticism. I designed the internal pages first and then was struggling on what to do on the homepage. The slider was more of a 'fill the space' decision than anything else and I was never happy with it. I will revisit that soon and see what improvements can be made. Feel free to suggest anything if you have any ideas.