SEB <> CCC Sync Call

Chris LaFay: No, they're not. So. Because they don't really. The site that we're pulling from is not really a website. It's like three or four page, like, sub. I'm not even going to call it a sub site. It's like they have like four or five pages within the Secretary of State's site. So they just don't have anything really.

Dawn Audano: Got it.

Chris LaFay: So that's the. That's the rub. They do have meetings and stuff that they do have. That's like the one thing on their site that they have. But it. It's not like those are not even like inside of a post. It's like manually editing, like an accordion on a page and they have to go and upload the files and edit the text. It's not like a custom post type with fields and blah, blah, blah, so.

Hope Coan: Got it.

Dawn Audano: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. I'm at least glad that they submitted a number of tickets. That makes me seem like they put. Spent time. A good amount of time on it.

Dawn Audano: Yeah, they were submitting them until last night, so I was like, okay. Is this automatically recording now?

Chris LaFay: I know that. The meetings. I know. So it should know. It's not. You can't set that in Google. Let me rephrase. We have to pay more money per user to have your meetings automatically record. You can have them automatically save a transcription.

Dawn Audano: Is that what it might be?

Chris LaFay: Let's. Here.

State Election Board: I just.

Chris LaFay: Oh, I can manage the. I don't know. Good question. I know that because I actually, I looked into it for a little while because I just wanted to have all my meetings, like, video recorded. And I spent hours trying to find. Trying to figure it out. And then. Yeah, they're in here.

Dawn Audano: They're. Good morning. Good morning. How's it going?

Chris LaFay: Good morning.

State Election Board: Good morning. How are y'all doing?

Hope Coan: Good.

Dawn Audano: How are you?

State Election Board: Good, thank you. You have a good week last week? Y'all are good.

Dawn Audano: I'm so good.

State Election Board: No sicknesses. There's a lot of stuff going around.

Chris LaFay: Yes. Thankfully, my wife is going out of town next week and I'm also going out of town, but we're going out of town in different directions. And so we get through that. That's kind of. That's the thing. Like, we're just trying to get through that.

State Election Board: Yeah. Bless your heart. That's so hard. And then y'all be bringing everything back together, traveling different places.

Chris LaFay: I'm going on a plane, so that's obviously a fantastic thing. And then my wife is driving up to Chattanooga with a friend of hers.

State Election Board: So still it's like so everywhere. Yeah, there's Covid going around, flu's going around. It's just been crazy.

Chris LaFay: Yes. No fun.

State Election Board: Okay, so let's kind of go through. Do y'all have everything that was sent over? I know some things are sent over yesterday late in the summer, so. Yeah, summer.

Dawn Audano: Just submitted a few. Is that true?

State Election Board: So I submitted for the complaint intake form.

Dawn Audano: Okay.

State Election Board: And then Ms. Hope, was she submitted for the rules? Did y'all see those?

Chris LaFay: Yep, we got all that. So I reviewed everything. I went through all the tasks this morning, and there was nothing in here that. Oops. Nope, nope, cancel that. There we go. I went through all the tasks this morning, and there wasn't anything in this list that through me for a loop. There are probably going to be one or two smaller things that are locked in by the design system, so things about like sizing of certain things. But I would say a solid. Probably 90% of the tasks that you submitted will be able to be completed as you've written them. So I don't have any. I don't have any questions about it. And if I do, I'll let you guys. We'll. We'll let you guys know. But I don't think, because there's about 25 or 30 tickets in here, give or take, I don't think going through them all one by one makes sense because most of them are just text changes and adding a pages and all those are very logical. So I say I'll. If we have questions, we'll kind of just bring them to you guys.

State Election Board: Okay. And then we're still ironing out the blog.

Chris LaFay: Yes.

State Election Board: With the pictures that we'll want to have with each one. So we're. There's going to be just rules. We have two rules that have been passed and several that are resolution. So we'll kind of do kind of like that to be more correct. More like that. So that's kind of the direction that we're going on. But we just need to confirm a couple things with those rules. But those will be posted in there. So we'll go ahead and just send you that today. Probably we should be done by that today. Latest, tomorrow.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. So once we get that, what, what I'm. What I'm seeing here, overall, I think we ended our last. Last time we had a conversation, we had a handful of bullet points that would trigger us starting to, like, work on this stuff again. So one is getting your blog post in. Two is receiving all of your new content for the website, and you've submitted tickets for the new content, as well as any text updates for the content that was brought over, as well as the image library from 123rf that Don has been going through and downloading those photos. And I know that you have a comment on that in a second. Once we have all of that, which will be today, tomorrow, ish, we'll go ahead and start going through all the tickets that you put in. Also going to the original. The original site and pulling in all of the meeting data and whatnot. And also pulling in all your blog posts and stuff and basically getting everything to probably about 90%. I'm not going to say 100% just because we're all human. We miss some things. It happens. But the next time you see the site, and we'll talk about timeline in a minute. The goal is all of your marker updates. Are all the updates that you sent over done. All the postings are in, images are swapped out. So really just doing one more. Y'all doing one more pass through the whole site, just making sure that stuff got imported correctly. And if you don't see any weird text changes, well, that'll kind of like signify, you know, the end effectively. So we're getting close.

State Election Board: Let me ask you something. I don't think that we saw a place on the top page and the first page where you can sign up for email notifications.

Chris LaFay: Do you? What system does that need to port into? I'm assuming y'all will have like some sort of like embed that we.

State Election Board: Would need to send mailchimp.

Chris LaFay: Okay, if you can send us a.

State Election Board: Link to that, that's what we need.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

State Election Board: Okay. Thank you so much.

Hope Coan: One thing I've been.

Dawn Audano: I've been pulling the images. We have like a five limit a day image. So I've been just doing it over the last few days. One of the images that was requested is this one. This is actually a logo for a Lithuanian bank.

State Election Board: Okay, never mind. Thank you so much.

Dawn Audano: Yeah, so if there's an. I don't know where this is going to go, but if we need another image, just let me know what to replace this with. But I'm not going to download this one.

State Election Board: No. And actually when I did the search for state election board, that's what came up.

Dawn Audano: Oh, that's funny. Yeah, because I like, I saw. I saw this text down here and so I googled it just to see and I was like, oh, yeah, that's definitely a bag.

State Election Board: Oh my days. I should have looked more further. Thank you all so much for Catching that.

Hope Coan: It's cool.

Dawn Audano: I just wanted to make sure that we had. If whatever we need to swap that out for, just let me know.

State Election Board: Okay. All right. We'll just watch it out for another bank, but we'll.

Hope Coan: We'll work on that.

Dawn Audano: Yeah, exactly. Other banks with other letters. We'll just do like TD bank and it'll be great.

Chris LaFay: Website will just be full of bank logos. Here we go. What. What does this group do? We have no idea. They're a bank.

State Election Board: What we're trying to say is. Show me the money. That's what we're trying to say.

Chris LaFay: Yes.

Dawn Audano: It's very subtle there. That was like a deep dive into banks to find that one.

State Election Board: I know. That's crazy. Sorry about that.

Hope Coan: Did Joel talk to y'all about hosting?

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So we're. Me and Joel are having a very fun time at the moment dealing with a couple of behind the scenes things. And so we're getting that all. We're getting that all sussed out at the moment. So all that's fine. It's taking some time just because I. Sometimes it. Things just take time. And so thank you for sending over the confirmation of the subdomain a couple of weeks ago. The simple fact that we got that information early is actually not delaying our launch now. Now I will. I will also say Joel told me to kind of mention this. Sometimes taking a website live and getting somebody to update the record for that domain name to point it from location A to location B, that ticket processing time internally for whoever manages that underneath. Not underneath Joel, but whoever Joel talks to to get it done. Sometimes that takes multiple days, sometimes a week. Now, the ones that we had to get done a couple weeks ago, they were. He was able to expedite and get it done within a few days. So that's good. He has connections there and yada, yada, yada. But just be aware, we're going to try to get it. We're going to try to point the domain name early. And so there might just be like a random little like, coming soon page that pops up. Only because it. Things just take a lot of time from a ticketing standpoint here. So we might do that if we see an opening to where we're like, we get it all set up and ready to go and somebody's like, we can do this for you right now. Might just go ahead and do that.

Hope Coan: I think that our director would like to have it to where we have a meeting, a board meeting August 19, and you really want to be able to Present it at the board meeting,.

Chris LaFay: That should be fine because that's a month from now. And so if you get all your content in over the next day or two, the remaining blog posts and whatnot, us getting in the content will take about a week, week and a half, give or take, probably. And then your last round of QA should honestly just take a couple of days. It's going to be pretty much the goal is to get it to about 90. It should just be editing small little tweaks and things. So that shouldn't be a problem. Once we get through this one speed bump with the hosting provider and the IT team, the next step should be a piece of cake. So.

Hope Coan: From us. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Chris LaFay: I don't see any issue with the middle of that middle of August date.

Hope Coan: Okay. The content, I think that we'd be able to. For me, it's hard to. I'm sorry, I keep hearing myself again,.

State Election Board: I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Hope Coan: It's hard for me to put in anything and whenever until I visually see where. Where it is and how. And then I'd be like, oh, okay, this is what I wanted to say. It needs to be shorter. It's too long.

Chris LaFay: And, you know, and that's the reason we do multiple rounds right now. Testing, 1, 2, 3. Don, can you hear me?

Hope Coan: Yes.

Chris LaFay: Yes. There we go. And that's the reason why we do multiple rounds. Like right now, I know you're kind of doing it blind, but then the next time you see everything, you'll have everything kind of all together effectively. And so that visual will be able to be locked in. Which I know, I know that when you're typing in text, kind of like as a wall of text, it's hard to know how things are going to be laid out. Because what we'll do is we'll take that wall of text that you typed in for some of the newer pages and lay them out how we best see fit. And once you see that, you're going to be like, oh, I get it now. Let's make some of these tweaks. And that's okay. Like that. That's 100% expected. But what we have done in the past, what we have tried, is handing folks that are not web people like a. A block system with different layouts and thinking about how to write content within these different layouts that typically has not worked before. So we stopped doing that and just said, give us your text. We'll lay it out and then you can then edit it and that even though there's a little more editing time, the creation time for folks that we've talked to decreases. So even though there's a little bit more editing, your overall time is shorter. And that's, that's always seemed to work. So.

Hope Coan: Okay, so right now from us, we can just keep submitting pictures until we see what y'all have done on your end and can make adjustments.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So all the photos that you sent over so far, I think you probably have enough images to cover the whole site with the list that you have. We're not also with images in particular. It's not a bad thing to use the same ones because people aren't paying that much attention now. Obviously we are, we're all in this thing and we're seeing things, but I think you submitted like 20 or 25 photos for a seven or eight page website. That's more than enough. And so we'll basically, they're all generic images at the end of the day, so we'll, we'll find ones that work best with the content, but at the end of the day, it's all election and flags and this, that and the other.

Dawn Audano: Right.

Chris LaFay: So not too concerned about imagery. Now that we have all of that, we'll put it all together. And then if you do have specific changes where you're like, actually, I wanted image 582-4982 in this section. You can leave a ticket with that and say, this is the one that I wanted to use here, and then we'll swap it. But going through and making those decisions without seeing them is hard. And then once you see it all together, what I typically have found is that when you see it all together, it all just kind of feels cohesive and you're like, oh, this all works. And really most of the changes are kind of micro. So the things that we'll, we'll need from you guys in the next few days are the, the three blog posts. And if you have more that you want to write, feel more than free, like, that's fine. It's not going to take us any more time to import, you know, three as it would eight any, any other images that you guys have. So there's more of those photo IDs that you want us to download, go ahead and send those over today or tomorrow with all of that. Number three is that intake form that CMIT was working on. All we need is the URL. So because it's hosted somewhere else, it has its own URL. When you guys confirm it, we just need that the link for it, just FOIA, I believe that's what it is, but I'm not 100% sure about the acronyms. It's been that ticket, that thread, that ticket thread that we've been on since the beginning with a guy and, I don't know, the IT department or CMIT or something along those lines. Y'all are working on a form and figuring out what fields you need and stuff along those lines. And then lastly, we'll need your mailchimp form. So there's a couple ways that that could be. That could be a link to a mailchimp form that is actually on mailchimp. They have like these hosted pages for the form. There's another version of it where we can actually take the form and embed it. And so we basically just need whatever you want for that. That's what we need. So those are the four things that we'll need from you guys. And then we will have everything we need.

Dawn Audano: And we can go through and correct me if I'm wrong, the styling for mailchimp has to be done in mailchimp. Correct. We can't style any mailchimp forms on our end.

Chris LaFay: Correct. That's all mailchimp owns, its styling. We like. We can't apply the fonts and the colors and things like that. Mailchimp has kind of its own static look and feel, and they like all of their stuff to look the same. And so that's something that we don't have control over.

Hope Coan: Okay, so just foia, that's for Open Records, and CMTS with Victor is with Complaints.

Chris LaFay: So. So there might be two then. So the one that I'm thinking of, the CMT s Victor, that's the name that sounds familiar. So that's one that I'm thinking of. So if there's a second link that we need to have another form for foia, we also just need that one as well.

Hope Coan: That's for Open Records.

Chris LaFay: Perfect. So, yeah, we need the Open Records link and the complaints link. Okay, both of those. And so for all of that, I know there's not really a place like to put that in a ticket. All of these things here isn't really a place to put in for like a ticket. So if you just wanted to send us one email that had all of that inside of it, including the blog post, like the word documents of the blog post and whatnot, that's all we need to kind of begin our week and a half process of actually getting everything up to date on the site.

Hope Coan: So Is there a section on the website that has election calendar?

Chris LaFay: I don't believe that was a page in our site map that we talked about.

Hope Coan: And I think it. There would be a link that goes directly to the Secretary of State's it so that people can see when the elections are happening. Like early voting. It'll give the dates.

State Election Board: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Oh, oh, so it's a page on the SOS site.

Hope Coan: Yes.

Chris LaFay: Oh, awesome. Yeah. So if you want. If you want that link added, we can add that to the menu bar. That's not a problem. Just send that over. So actually that actually be a good. You can actually put a ticket in for that. Just highlight. Put a little box around the navigation bar and just type in like, hey, what do you want the link to say? And then where do you want it to go to?

State Election Board: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Simple and easy. Any questions, any other questions or thoughts?

Hope Coan: So you're. You're not going to get started until we get these five things to you?

Chris LaFay: Because it's all. Doing it all in one fell swoop is the easiest way to do it, rather than doing it like this, like starting and stopping and starting and stopping.

Hope Coan: Okay, so we need. If we get everything to you today, then you'll be about to get started and when we meet again.

Chris LaFay: So it'll take about a week and a half to knock all this stuff out. So technically we meet again next Tuesday. Chances are it won't be done by next Tuesday. So by July 28th is when about what our next scheduled meeting will be, when it will be done by. If it gets done before that, we'll send it. Well, you have the link to the site and so if it gets done before that, we'll send over like a video that kind of walks you through all the. Not every change, but just like kind of walking you through some of the. Hey, here's the page. We got your content. This is why we laid it out like this. And y'all could get together and then do that final round of qa. There's really nothing that a live call is going to showcase new with that. It's just like, hey, it's here for you. So if we get it done before that, we'll send over a loom video and give you guys permission to go ahead and start submitting tasks as well. And like before, I do recommend submitting those tasks together or divide and conquer like you guys did, but just don't overlap each other just because then we'll have to ask you who wins, Hope or Sherry at the end of the day. So what about.

State Election Board: Will we still have a meeting next.

Chris LaFay: Week, too, if we need it? Yes. We'll go through and maybe get. We'll probably get started on some of these changes this week. If you do, send them all over by today. So if we have any questions, that'll be a good time for us to ask those. At the moment, I don't think we're going to have any questions that can't just be handled by a quick email with some yes and no's. So there's a chance that we'll probably cancel next week's meeting.

State Election Board: Okay.

Dawn Audano: I'm going to keep it on the calendar until next Monday, just in case. I love having meetings on the calendar. It's so fun.

Chris LaFay: I am optimistic about not having meetings. Don is very optimistic about keeping them so that there's a placeholder rebound. This is a great. It's a great balance that we have. So.

Hope Coan: All right, we're getting closer.

Dawn Audano: Yes, we are. I'll send over the summary with all the stuff that we're missing, and then if you guys have any questions. I did get the extra images that were sent in last night added to my list, so I'll probably have those finished downloading by, like, the end of the week just because of the way our credits work. But other than that, I think we're in good shape.

Hope Coan: All right, well, thank you so much.

State Election Board: Thank you.

Chris LaFay: Thank you.

Hope Coan: Bye.

Chris LaFay: Take care, guys.

State Election Board: Bye.

Chris LaFay: Bye.

Hope Coan: All right, bye. Bye.