State Election Board - Current
Chris LaFay: Hello. This one. Let's try this one this time. Where's my plug? Sorry, that was a lot of noises. I. I have normally have like a lightning port, lightning cable, just kind of floating. And I remembered when I left my office last week that it fell down behind my desk and now I have to go find it, which I'm not going to do that now, but that's the whole thing. Anyway,.
Dawn Audano: I have a wireless charger for my AirPods now.
Chris LaFay: This one, I got the one generation before that. Now these have lasted me like four years. Now I'm due for new ones, but they still work.
Dawn Audano: I upgraded and gave Laurel my old ones, so Ainsley has mine from like two times ago. And then Laurel has my last one. I like, upgraded specifically so that they would each have AirPods. It's easier to travel with.
Chris LaFay: Yes.
Dawn Audano: So I have really had those big headphones.
Chris LaFay: I realized how crappy these are because I really only use these, like, to talk on the phone with. But I've. I listened to music in them recently and was like, oh, man, these are bad. Like, one of them sounds like one of them, almost like the bases out of it. Whereas the other one, it's all in one of them. Like, the noise canceling qualities of it are just not. Don't exist anymore. And so they're great for phone calls. But that's. That's about it though. So I will say that these lovely people had very big struggles getting into Google Meet last time. So it will not.
Dawn Audano: Okay.
Chris LaFay: They were logging in with the same Gmail account, so they kept kicking each other out as they kept popping in. And I'm like,.
Dawn Audano: Because there are teams, people. Is that why? Yeah, got it.
Chris LaFay: She did text me and say that they were good for today. Good morning.
Dawn Audano: I created an ASANA board. Well, I have an Asana board for like, managing my household tasks. Yeah. And after our ATS call, I went in and added all the stuff that Pete did yesterday and then I checked it all off for him and assign due dates to the tasks that are yet to be complete. But then he.
Chris LaFay: Does he check it?
Dawn Audano: I mean, he'll get emails. Now, not that his inbox is anything that's, like, functional, but conceptually he should. I, like, texted him too. I was like, hey, and he has a board for his work. And I messaged him and I was like, hey, I see you have some tasks overdue. Do you want me to follow up with you on those or do you want to take care of that? Because one of them just says, like, download hprc Annotations And I was like, well, that seems like a task that can run in the background.
Chris LaFay: I can't fathom what my life would be like if Ally had a. Did that. Oh. And if I had tasks for her to do.
Dawn Audano: His ADHD is off the rails. Like, it is.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. I have no doubt.
Dawn Audano: Yeah, it is off the rails. Like, it is a whole other level. And then I have two kids who are also struggling with it, and I'm like, I don't know, guys.
Chris LaFay: I feel more like that this year than I ever have ever in my life.
Dawn Audano: I. I was diagnosed with adhd, and I turned to my therapist and I was like, I think I just caught it. Like, I don't think I actually have it. I think I have situational adhd. Because. I was like, I, I. I don't think I do, but maybe I'm not.
Chris LaFay: Going to go get diagnosed or, like, I've lived with it my whole life. So it's just a matter of figuring out what methods and modes help get stuff done. And sadly, it's the fifth message to me that's like, hey, hey, hey, hey.
Dawn Audano: I don't know if I have ADHD and cope really well or if I just am actually, like, fine, Fine.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Dawn Audano: Anyway, you can let these humans in.
Chris LaFay: Yes. We'll see what happens. Y' all are together today.
State Election Board: Good morning.
Chris LaFay: Did y' all have a fun Memorial Day? Y' all do anything relaxing this weekend?
State Election Board: Yes, both of us did the beach and the lake. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: That's what I'm talking about. Did y' all just go down just for, like, the weekend and then come back, like, yesterday afternoon or something? Or were you there for, like, the whole week?
State Election Board: Yeah, we. We just came back last night. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Nice.
Dawn Audano: Okay.
State Election Board: How about you guys?
Chris LaFay: We did. My wife and I did basically nothing, but this week we have plans Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday night. So we relaxed Friday through Sunday, and then we just have a gauntlet this week of stuff, which I'm not sad about this all, it's all good stuff. It's all fun stuff. Stuff. But this introvert will want to sit down in a quiet room after this week is over and you're exhausting. Recharge the batteries. Needless to say.
State Election Board: Gotcha. I know. I'm the same way.
Dawn Audano: All I did was recharge. I did a 3D puzzle, I finished a regular puzzle, and I read two books, so.
State Election Board: Oh, wow. That's a good. That does sound so relaxing.
Chris LaFay: By the way, this is dawn, who I realized I've never actually introduced you guys to. So I apologize about that. I scheduled our kickoff call a few weeks ago and after it was done, Don was like, hi, I'm over here. And I'm like, oh, crap, I'm sorry. I basically just sprinted with this thing. And so I apologize that I did not, A, introduce her to you three weeks ago, and B, did not introduce her to you at the top of this meeting. So, Dawn.
Dawn Audano: Hi. Nice to meet y' all too. I'm sorry, what are your.
State Election Board: Who is who I'm sharing. This is Sherry.
Dawn Audano: Okay. It's nice to meet you.
Chris LaFay: So Don will be the one making sure that all of this stays on the rails because I have great intentions, but I am not that person at all. And dawn has gotten to know my quirks over the last decade and she knows that sometimes it takes 16 messages to get me to do something. Sometimes. So here we are. So today I did brief dawn over kind of where we're going, but I'll kind of, I'll kind of kick things off and get things rolling. We may or may not need the whole hour today. What has been done over the last few weeks is we talked about this orchard design system a lot. Well, a lot of that has been implemented within WordPress now. And so we have five core pages that are going to be built out within the scope as well as the meetings, the rules, the petitions, and the bulletins as well. And so the baseline of a lot of that has been done. So basically what we're going to see here today is about 60 to 70% of a lot of different things. And then there's going to be a delta where all the meetings haven't been imported yet. All of the page content hasn't been imported yet. But a couple of them have some things on the homepage. The structure is there, but not all the words are there. So we're going to see a lot of kind of half baked things, but it's going to be very visually solid though. And so the goal is to basically just hear reactions that. And so there's going to be. There's going to be a couple of different responses that we're going to get here is if you, whenever you react to something that's, you know, something that's outside of what the system provides, you might hear things like, I'll probably talk about things like that's not what the system provides, but let's talk about a different way that we could possibly do that. We're going to talk a little bit about content and what types of content areas you might want on certain pages. And then also I'm going to showcase some of the functionality just to give you a preview. This isn't really a training but just to show you kind of, so that you have an idea of kind of the back end of how some things are wired up so that as you see things on different pages, some of those small little details might kind of surface up. So that is my plan for today. And when we wrap up, really what I'd like to kind of leave us with are a handful of different design choices that we might want to make. Some missing gaps of content that we'll need from you guys so that we can then do a more a larger content import. And then if we missed anything from the meetings, organization of stuff and how the different fields work and things like that, wanted to note those now before we do this massive import of the last two years worth of data. So that is my plan. Does that sound good to you guys?
State Election Board: Yes, perfect.
Chris LaFay: Awesome. Lovely. Let me go ahead and move my screens around a little bit now and share my screen. I would also would help to actually have like the website pulled up too, you know, that would also be kind of important. Here we go. Okay, so going in, sharing this tab here and let's get it kicked off so we have the bare bones of the homepage here. This all follows the. And I'm gonna actually. So I'm gonna actually kind of like sit at my pulpit here for a minute. I'm gonna kind of give a general overview of a lot of different things. I'm not going to go super in depth. So if you make, make notes on a couple of different small things and then we'll go back and kind of touch base on each of the different pages. But I want to do, I want to kind of encapsulate everything all in one fell swoop for you. So we have a lot of the pieces from that Orchard design system here we'll see kind of the header section here. We have the navigation menu here. We do need to upload the the seal which will go right over there. Got the main header section, we got some of the quick links over here we have a dynamic block that will automatically pull when the next board meeting is, the date, the time and whether it's in person or virtual. We have the most recent bulletin that'll be over here. We have some open ended text that could be placed over here as well too. The bulletin will show kind of the most recent date. There's nothing else right here. I know we talked about Doing like having like a YouTube video or something along those lines down below. But we didn't really hone in on what the homepage really needed. And with kind of give a very. You have a website that has very minimal content to it. So I didn't want to add stuff to the homepage that wasn't necessary. But I do like the idea of having the main menu up here as well as some hot links over here with kind of more iconography. Even though there probably will be some duplication from here to here. I think that's okay. We're talking about a government website where we want to get people to the page that they need to get to as quickly as possible. The About Us page. Because I wanted at least show you kind of what one kind of core page will look like. This is one that doesn't have a kind of like the normal header section, like with an image and stuff like that. All of this content was pulled from the existing About Us page. See the Open Records request there with the. The URL. We have everybody's images that are cropped.
Dawn Audano: Oops.
Chris LaFay: So that they all fit in the same size. No more accordion menus. And you have to like click a little arrow and it pops down. It's all just right there for you. We also have the agency staff with the different icon cards here as well, within the contact information here. Max, thinking about getting rid of this off this page because that contact information will live in the footer as well too. Let's look at meetings as well. So here. Now, these are all fake meetings, mind you. The goal was I wanted to have. This is all. These are all fake. Nothing is real here. I wanted to have meetings that had a variety of different types of settings clicked on. Whereas the ones that you have in existence right now are all. They can be more robust later. But I wanted to kind of showcase all the different features kind of in one fell swoop. So I just had it. I just imported some generic ones. So here we're going to have the various different meetings. This will be kind of the laundry list of all of them. When you click in on them, you'll see that we have the date. We'll notice that it's a board meeting. The address and the time will be listed out. Here in the header we have a list of the documents. So all the different documents that are loaded in as PDFs will be listed here. And if there are associated rules or petitions, those will also be listed here. Going over to December 11, given that there was a cancellation notice. Uploaded as a PDF file. This whole thing is marked as canceled. So there's a big old red bar that goes across there. But you can also see here that there is a petition that is linked to that single petition to be able to see what that is. Whereas rules, there are none that are available. So that right there is actually a pretty significant portion of the site, because the rest of the pages are basically just going to be a couple of forms and a handful of some other content and whatnot. And so rather than importing stuff that may or may not be right, I wanted to kind of walk you through this basic piece and get that initial gut reaction before doing the rest of it. So what are your initial thoughts here? Oh, actually, one last piece. This little alert bar is actually customizable as well. You'll see that it is. You know, probably notice it's on every single page. There are settings in the back end of WordPress that allow you to either turn this off or on. This one does have a link. You'll see the little arrow there. But it does not have to have a link. So if you did want to put an alert across the entire website, whether it has a link or not, you'll be able to do that within a couple of clicks as well, too. And so right now I have one turned on just so that you could see what that looks like. Now, with that said, what questions do you guys have right now?
State Election Board: So where would the. Okay, so the request. An investigation. Did we click on that?
Chris LaFay: No. So that page is not built out yet? I do not believe. Actually. No, there actually is. We actually put some content in here.
State Election Board: Okay, So this would be where we incorporate the. The program.
Chris LaFay: The program, yeah. The link to the outside location. Yes. Yeah, correct. So, like, this is where this button right here would be the one that would go to that system. Correct.
State Election Board: Okay. Okay.
Chris LaFay: Keep in mind this content was all pulled directly from your side, and maybe there might also been some inferences made while pulling this content. So I would love for you guys to look at this and read it and just let us. We'll actually install a tool on the site so that you guys can let us know exactly what changes that you want to make. That tool is not installed yet, but it will be in the next day. So just.
State Election Board: Okay. Yeah, because it'll take some time to kind of look through it. Totally. Elections office, Is that going to. For all the counties. Update your county context. Okay.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, this is the. So this is the. This is the form that we spent some time talking about last a few Weeks ago. So you'll be able to select your county and then you then edit the supervisor's information, the director's information, the registrar's information. Then you click on submit and then that's where you'll get that email that comes into you.
State Election Board: Okay, perfect.
Chris LaFay: Yep.
State Election Board: Okay, so you said we'll have a link to this right here so we can look at it and read it and.
Chris LaFay: Okay, correct. Yes. And I know that there are going to be changes here, so that's kind of the goal. The kind of the goal in the process is I wanted to get enough information onto the site so that you had something to think about and chew on. So rather than trying to get it from 0% to 100% the first time, the goal was to get it as expeditiously to 0% to 60%, because that, that difference of 60 to 40, that's the part that takes the longest. And rather than having a lot of these back and forth conversations on things, I feel like getting you something that you can feel and touch and test out is probably going to be a more efficient process then trying to talk about it for hours and hours and hours on end when y' all could just react to it. Drop us some notes and then we can get it pretty close to perfect that next round.
State Election Board: That sounds good.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, lovely. So we'll send this over to you. We'll get this installed way that this will look. Do we have one? Does it still have it on here? Let me see. It does. Awesome. Let me go ahead and share so that you guys know what you're about to walk into. We have another site that's in testing currently. It's a video production company's website. What you'll see, we can change the.
State Election Board: Colors and design as long as we stay in the template.
Chris LaFay: There are predefined color palettes, right. And so we can change the color palette, but we're using that stars and stripes one. So if you wanted to go back to the orchard side and choose a different color palette, let me know what that is. And that's actually very easy to swap. On the back end there's just a drop down menu and then all the colors will be swapped across the board.
State Election Board: Is there a way to have it to where it's not so much light?
Chris LaFay: Have so much what? Sagan White. So much light in terms of like. Oh, the color white. Yeah. So we can make different sections.
State Election Board: Yeah. Like this right here with the navy blue. To me, this looks nicer than with a bunch of pages that are just white.
Chris LaFay: What I would recommend doing is what I, what I don't like to do from a content organization perspective is just throw color on the page willy nilly. So as you're going through these pages, like actually this would be. This actually be a good use of this. So like this board member section and this agency staff section, this would actually be a good. All of this content here is just stuff that people are going to read top to bottom. There really isn't a reason to segment it. But when you think about we're about to go into a different section where we're talking about photos of people, their names, their job titles, etc. Those make more sense to kind of section off with background colors. The, the harder piece would be something like with open records requests. This is just kind of a laundry list of, of text. How to divide this up into sections to where there'd be enough words in there to have it make sense. Would be a little bit harder without it just looking like, oh, we just threw a navy blue strip on the back end of this. So when you're, when you're editing, when you're providing feedback on content, which I'll show you how to do that in a moment, focus mostly on the words and then if you have ideas, feel free to also include that. The way I like to think about things is if we can put things. This is a, this is an oversimplification, but here's a good like train of thought. If think. If content can be actually put into a multiple column layout, that's always a good signifier of like a really good visual break. So for example, going back over here, what happens next? There really isn't a reason to kind of break these into like column layouts and stuff like that. This fees. It's just a paragraph. Now these frequently asked questions, these might actually could be able to be turned in like some like toggleable fields that might make sense to do something like that. But in general for like this one, this page is basically just like four or five paragraphs with headings. So the layout options that you have at your disposal here is there's not going to be as many the count for the election office. We could probably put the, the whole contact, the whole form inside of more of like a different section. But that's going to be about it on this page as well too. So does that give you a couple of ideas to kind of bounce around in your head? I know, I'm just going to talk a lot there.
State Election Board: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Chris LaFay: Awesome. So in Terms of leaving feedback, what you're going to see. And I'm going to share this other website here with you right now on your site, there's going to be this red button that'll say report issue or report feedback. It'll be this nice red. What will happen is when you're on the page, you're going to kind of center up whatever you want to leave feedback on. So let's say I want to leave feedback on this whole section. So I kind of scroll to where everything is visible. I'll then click on report issue. And now it takes a screenshot of whatever was in your browser at that time. And so what I would recommend doing here is be very specific when you're typing in your feedback is tell us what the existing text says and then what you would like it to be replaced with. So like, for example, a good way here, like if you want to change hot off the presses, I would right here say change hot off the presses with our work. And you can even draw on the the actual thing as well too, if you'd like. So there was a couple of different things that you wanted to note. You could then say, change how to the presses with our work. And then over here on the cars with projects, change the animated word to on animated. I'm making this stuff up. I don't know. And then when you. You'll click on create and that will dump straight into our system for us. So the more specific you can be here, the better and the more accurate the next round will be as well. Does that make sense? Awesome. So, yeah, we'll get this installed on your website here probably either today or first thing tomorrow. And then Don will send you the link to the site and as well as just the simple fact that, hey, the tool's been set up. You can go ahead and start leaving feedback now.
State Election Board: Okay.
Chris LaFay: And the other thing I wanted to show you guys really quick was. Not in there. Where would it be under. Hold on one second, let me. And if I can't find this, I will wait and show you guys this later. It's not the most important thing. Where is this? Come on. Trying to find the password. Give me one moment. There it is. Okay. Did that work? The joy of working on two computers, which is what I'm doing right now. So my password saved on another one. There we go. So just to give you an idea of how these meetings work, we go ahead and share this tab. Not going to get into the entirety of the back end of WordPress right now, but you'll have this meeting section over here on the left hand side where you'll have a list of all the different meetings and you'll be able to add a new meeting. And adding a meeting is as simple as just typing in fields. So let's say we wanted to put the meeting date of May 29th and we're going to be meeting at 6pm select, put the address in of 1234 Broad Street, Atlanta, Georgia. And then here's all the different PDFs that you can upload. So the one that is required is the agenda. So go here to add a file. You'll be able to upload your PDF file here. I'm just going to grab a random PDF. You can upload as many as you want. You can also put a YouTube link over here as well. And then down here, here's all the different rules that you have at your disposal as well as all the petitions. So maybe we're going to do this one and this one and then we're going to do those petitions here as well. Let's go ahead and upload the public notice as well too. We're just going to grab a random PDF and I'm actually just going to go ahead and fill out all these fields so you can kind of see what it looks like, even though they're all the same. Got your meeting minutes, got your act. I'm not going to upload cancellation notes because I don't want to change. And then we're going to publish.
Dawn Audano: And.
Chris LaFay: Notice how the title automatically is updated based on the meeting date and the meeting time that you select there. And then we're going to open this up, share this tab. So you'll see here that we have that there what's marked as upcoming. You'll see the list of rules, the list of petitions, and then all the PDFs here as well too. So editing these is extraordinarily simple. It's all dynamic. And then I believe I made this one earlier. Yep, there you go. So this on the homepage is now updated because the next board meeting, the one that I had created prior to this, was in June, this one's in May. And so now that's listed right there on the homepage for you without having to do anything else. So that's not a full blown training session, but in general, does that make sense?
State Election Board: Yes.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah. It's going to be super simple. And the rules and petitions will work exactly the same way. There's just less fields to have to deal with. Rules, I think rules, I Think are just a couple of different fields. Yeah. So there's the associated meanings there, there's your description, there's your SOS link as well. Petitions are the same and then bulletins are very simple. On the homepage there's this block here that just basically has the title and description. And so when you're in your bulletin section, all it's going to do is showcase the most recent bulletin for you. So you have the ability to type in whatever text you want. You can have paragraphs, you can add text links, etc, and it'll just display the title and whatever content you have in this box and it will then also display the date in which it was published down here at the bottom. So again, very simple. When you add a new one that gets replaced and you're good to go. Simple.
State Election Board: Now are we gonna be able to see the back end right now?
Chris LaFay: No. So I did at least wanted to give you just a quick preview of it. We'll get everything lot like locked up and loaded. All your content, all the images, all that type of fun stuff. We'll get all that in there for you. Then we'll do an actual training session. But I just wanted to give you. And that'll all be recorded and there will also be tutorial videos as well that you can then go and prepare peruse on your own. So once everything launches, then you will have admin access to your website. You will be able to go and edit anything you want and view all the training videos that we have that are loaded on the back end of the site as well.
State Election Board: So if we need to edit the form, just say like, like even in the rules petitions, like there's something else that needs to be added in there. Would we have the capabilities of doing that?
Chris LaFay: Yes.
State Election Board: Wow. Love it.
Chris LaFay: Well, actually, let me back home you actually I misheard you. Hold on, give me one second. Re. Ask the question again differently. I heard two different things and my brain processed only one of them. Sorry.
State Election Board: So say that we're. We're putting in the rules and there's information that is not. It doesn't pop up as information that we can put in. Can we add a field?
Chris LaFay: Oh, the rules. I heard the. I heard when you said the word form, my initial thought was the. The county office form to update that stuff so to adding in fields here. No, that will not be possible because there's a lot. There's programming that has to happen to add the field and then get it to display on the website. However, doing that is very simple. It's Only a couple of hours of time. And so my recommendation is if you do it, making those changes now is very easy and can be in scope. So if you're thinking about these things in terms of what other fields you might want to add, let me know because we can go ahead and add those in now, but we can't see.
State Election Board: The film because we're not seeing the back end.
Chris LaFay: That's true. So what I'll do is I will take. I'll take screenshots of these various different ones here for you.
State Election Board: Okay, thanks.
Chris LaFay: So that you can see them. And if there's anything you want to change, let us know.
State Election Board: Okay, that'd be perfect. Thank you so much.
Chris LaFay: Not a problem at all. We'll go ahead and then dawn will send that over to you in her follow up email that she sends out as well too. So.
Dawn Audano: Perfect.
Chris LaFay: Any other questions immediately.
State Election Board: I'll have to look at it real good.
Dawn Audano: Just.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I'd have to look at it.
State Election Board: A little bit and then have something totally. But we're on a roll, dear.
Chris LaFay: Yes, that, that was the goal, was to get things moving so that we're going to take a pause from a development perspective for right now in terms of. We'll be able to get you guys over the link to go view the site with the feedback tool added in by tomorrow. In terms of putting in feedback into that, would you guys be able to have that done by next week around the same time?
State Election Board: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Awesome. Right now we don't have a recurring meeting set up.
State Election Board: Next to next Wednesday and Thursday. We will be in meetings all day.
Chris LaFay: Okay, let's look at the calendar. Don, I'll let you drive this particular part. You know, you're meeting calendar and cadence better than I do.
Dawn Audano: If there's anything on Monday, let me look really quick. That's always my preferred meeting day. Could you do from 10 to 10:30 on Monday the 1st?
State Election Board: I think yeah, I can do 10. I can do 10th and 30th. Jennifer will be done with. I think she'll be done with her orientation, but it's not like it's gonna be okay.
Dawn Audano: I could also do 11 to 11:30.
State Election Board: Earlier the better.
Dawn Audano: Yeah, earlier the better. Okay, let's do 10 to 10. Let's do the 10 to 1030 run. Okay, perfect.
Chris LaFay: That sounds good.
State Election Board: Yeah, I'm sorry.
Dawn Audano: Yeah, I'll send. I'm sending it right now.
State Election Board: Okay, thank you.
Chris LaFay: Perfect. Went ahead and took those screenshots. I'll get those sent over to Don. She'll send those screenshots over to you for the different fields for those three different, different pieces, the meetings, rules and petitions. We'll get the, the. The tool installed for you. So you go ahead and start leaving feedback on things and then we'll meet up again next Monday, have all your feedback. We might not have made any progress on that yet, but we'll basically be able to review all of that ahead of time. As long as you can get it in before, like Thursday night, Friday morning so that we can kind of review it on Friday. Mondays, we do have a gauntlet of meetings, so if you sent it in Monday at 9am Chances are we're not going to be able to get to it and look at it. But we'll review any of those tickets ahead of time. And if we have any questions for you, that's what we'll use our time on Monday to go over. If we don't have any questions, then we might. There's a chance we might just cancel it and say, hey, thank you for sending it. We have no questions. We're good to go. Have some time back in your day, so.
State Election Board: All right.
Chris LaFay: Does that sound good to you guys?
State Election Board: Yeah, sounds perfect.
Chris LaFay: Awesome. Any other questions before we wrap today?
State Election Board: No, we just kind of have to like, wrap our brain around looking at it all and seeing the information and. And just like, it's just kind of like once you see it, then we'll know how to. What we like, what we don't like, what things, you know. So that's just kind of a great starting point for us.
Chris LaFay: Fantastic. That is the plan. Awesome. Perfect. Well, thank you guys so much for the time today. I really appreciate it. And we'll get all this stuff over to you here shortly.
State Election Board: Thank you so much. Nice.
Chris LaFay: Take care. Bye. It.