UX & IA Design Thinking

I have been working with the State of Illinois to get their public .gov SharePoint 2007 site up and running. http://www.illinois.gov . The site has undergone a major UI and Usability overhaul and is now live! This site is built for all users. Accessibility has been a huge focus. We plan on adding some additional features that will really make this a top 10 State Government Website. During the process we reviewed some of last years top ranked state government websites: Center for Digital Government Ranking site. 1st Place: Utah 2nd Place: California 3rd Place: Arkansas (SharePoint) 4th Place: Maine 5th Place: Colorado Others: West Virginia (SharePoint) Maryland (SharePoint) The Governors site is in the process to be upgraded as well.

I have been asked quite a few times if the SharePoint 2007 two tier global navigation will work with SharePoint 2010. The answer is yes with a few slight modifications. The approach stays the same: Master Page points to web.config > web.config points to .sitmap file > Page Renders custom navigation control. The difference between 2007 and 2010 of course is that you want to add the custom site map provider to the new 2010 web.config file. Search for the following in the web.config file: “ sitemap ”. within the last row add the following: <add name=" DEMOGlobalNavSiteMapProvider " siteMapFile="/ _layouts/1033/styles/demo/DemoGlobalNav.sitemap " type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPXmlContentMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" /> You will notice that I placed my custom sitemap file in the style folder within the layouts directory. There is also some slight changes to ho...