So much time has since passed that we have decided to reboot the whole site rebuilding thing and work purposefully toward a new, better designed set of WordPress templates based on current responsive web design. So, out of the box, here is our initial take: LSNC’s RCFE Field Guide:

The guide is a modest but useful online checklist, with citations, for ombudsman investigators in California who need quick reference to the regulatory requirements affecting the rights of residents of long-term care facilities for the elderly.

This site design is our first attempt to come up with a re-usable flexible grid design that scales and repositions page elements smoothly to accomodate varied viewports, from the desktop down to a 7″ form factor and down further to a typical smartphone display. The design relies on core code from the very clean, minimalist Origin WordPress theme. Lovin’ it.

Other posts of possible interest...

• LSNC Regulation Summaries: Variations on a Theme
• The Race Equity Project rebuild debuts
• Rebuild 10: Deconstruction of the Reconstruction
• What our tech training survey tells us

A distillation of the results can be viewed in the LSNC Tech Training Survey: The Big Numbers.

By way of background, some of these overall survey results are not particularly surprising. For example, not shown in these results is our institutional reality that, with rare exceptions, LSNC staff are required to use Gmail and Google Calendar, but not Google Docs or other Google Apps. It is not surprising, then, that users are more familiar with and feel less need for training on Gmail and Google Calendar than they do for other Google Apps. And since our adoption of the Pika CMS several years ago, staff have long been encouraged, if not required, to use the Firefox browser, which undoubtedly explains its overwhelming dominance of use at 94%. LSNC also remains flexible about what “word processor” staff use. (My apologies to those taken aback by the quotes, but I consider that term so… antiquated.) LSNC supports and staff are free to use any text editor they choose, but production of form and non-form court documents are subject to specific office protocols that include standardized pleading templates conforming to California Court Rules that work for both Word and WordPerfect.

As the survey results show, and as expected, use of Word (73%) has overtaken the still popular but inexorably fading WordPerfect (65%) in use by staffers. (Full disclosure: I am in the WordPerfect camp, but even I no longer use it except for formal court document preparation. My workaday text editor of choice? Google Docs.) The surprising number here is how much Google Docs is now regularly used among LSNC staffers: 38%. (We specifically asked whether they used it regularly, not whether they had used it at all.) Google Docs is not practical for preparation of formal court pleadings, but is now trending upward as a regularly used text-editing and document-sharing work horse among staff. The web-based work paradigm has definitely broken through across all LSNC staff. Not all staff use Google Docs, to be sure, but the vast majority are now confident how to upload files to Google Docs (75%) and share Google Docs (68%). I was personally pleased to see that 30% of LSNC staff also now regularly use Google Chrome, a much higher rate than I expected.

And what about staff perceptions of their tech training needs? Truthfully, I was personally surprised to see that 38% of staff felt no need for training on desktop applications, and even 24% did not feel the need for training on web-based applications. I would not have guessed numbers that high. But for those who did express a need, what were the big numbers? The five highest requests for tech training were all for web-based applications:

• 58% ~ Manymoon
• 41% ~ Google Spreadsheets
• 28% ~ Google Docs
• 18% ~ Google Calendar
• 11% ~ Gmail

It is worth noting what these five applications have in common: They are all core Google Apps or, in the case of Manymoon, integrated with Google Apps.

Other posts of possible interest...

• The impact of proliferating “share” options on our use of project management tools
• The Manymoon experience
• WordPerfect: The meme that will not die
• Google Drive and the price of progress

Other posts of possible interest...

• First take at responsive web design
• What our tech training survey tells us
• The Race Equity Project rebuild debuts
• LSNC Regulation Summaries: Variations on a Theme

This last weekend we rolled out the second LSNC subsite rebuild: The Race Equity Project. The redesign elements will look familiar to those who have followed the LSNC rebuild series here that provides the core code base for the custom variations we eventually will deploy at all the LSNC.net domain sites.

The Race Equity Project rebuild directly reflects several touches first built out and tested here, namely, better use of the Google custom search API; more practical findability of archive posts by providing a browsing metaphor for visually scanning a list of posts in inverse chronological order; handy-dandy sharing improvements with use of the WordPress ShareDaddy plugin to add Twitter, Facebook, Email and Print doodads below each post and most pages; and, of course, our roll out of WPtouch Pro to provide visitors with a clean, intuitive mobile version of the site.

Widely recognized and respected for its leadership role within the national legal services community on race equity issues affecting low-income communities, the Race Equity Project has honored and supported its mission with 320+ posts since November 2006. This is the REP statement of it’s origin and purpose:

In 2003, through an empirically-based self-assessment, Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) found marked racial disparities in the allocation of resources in our service area. Through further investigation and staff education, LSNC gained program-wide awareness that although the form of race discrimination has changed over past decades from predominantly overt and intentional to the implicit and institutional, discrimination continues to burden grossly LSNC’s clients and communities of color. This led LSNC to establish the Race Equity Project (REP) in 2004. The Race Equity Project seeks to address issues of race within our service area by (1) identifying race disparities in the institutions and systems used by LSNC’s clients; (2) educating clients and community agencies and organizations about these disparities and how to address them; and (3) enforcing laws and policies to eliminate or mitigate these disparities.

The REP is not a specialty unit within LSNC, but rather a program-wide broad approach to legal aid advocacy guided by the REP coordinators. LSNC implements the REP by using the following tools: (1) understanding social cognition and understanding and adopting strategies to counteract implicit bias and structural/institutional racism; (2) communications framing; (3) mapping and data presentation; and (4) community lawyering.

It will likely be sometime in May before we get the top-level LSNC Advocate feed done, but it’s coming.

Other posts of possible interest...

• First take at responsive web design
• LSNC Regulation Summaries: Variations on a Theme
• What our tech training survey tells us
• Trouble in River City

We have implemented the first real iteration of the new LSNC site redesign: LSNC Regulation Summaries (née Regs @ LSNC.net), a subsite of Legal Services of Northern California’s home site. Of the LSNC sites we are in the process of rebuilding, this is the easiest to do, since it is just a collection of hundreds of straight-up post items, plus only two simple custom pages — an about page and a search result page, the latter being the content-target page for the Google custom search API. (For the record, LSNC has posted 954 regulation summaries since 2004.)

Those following the recent rebuild series of articles here will recognize the source of many of the design elements. I won’t go into those again.

That said, I do want to mention the virtuous cycle that comes with rebuilding all our sites on the WordPress 3.x multisite platform, while reaping the benefits of core web standards now more widely implemented by all major web browsers.

First, with WordPress we have been able to build a core set of new “LSNC” theme files that, for the first time, will be uniform and standardized across all of our sites, with the added advantage of a unified network administrative panel and single login for editors to all the sites to which they add content. Adding plugins and updating the core WordPress application is also now way easier since it can be done once for all our sites.

Second, because everything is being rebuilt on the WordPress platform, we are able to use the wondrous WPtouch Pro plugin, which makes deployment of a mobile-ready site quite effortless. You can view two slightly different implementations we’ve done of WPtouch by viewing Webdogs 3.0 and Regulation Summaries on your smartphone. This is a plugin that we can turn on and configure in about 30 seconds for all other LSNC sites, as we roll the new design out.

Third, I cannot overstate how much the adoption of web standards has simplified the development and made vastly more predictable the results of our CSS code. Setting aside for the moment the proprietary CSS property values one still has to use to implement CSS3 box-shadow and border-radius (rounded corner) effects, I was somewhat stunned to discover that the only other design element in the entire site that required any browser-specific change at all was the search-text input field, which is dynamically generated by the Google search API code. And even that quirk was minimal. I had to make changes to the CSS padding property of that element to make the presentation reasonably uniform among Firefox, Webkit (Chrome and Safari), Opera and IE. Yep, a tweak for one CSS property associated with one CSS selector. That’s it.

WordPress. HTML5. CSS3. Web Standards. Lovin’ it.

Other posts of possible interest...

• First take at responsive web design
• Rebuild 10: Deconstruction of the Reconstruction
• The Race Equity Project rebuild debuts
• Rebuild 09: Google custom search + mobile + related posts

We’re at least a few weeks, likely about a month or so away from implementing the redesign and repurposing of the LSNC Advocate Feed and all its special project subdomains (e.g., the Race Equity Project). Click on the image to the right for a visual taste of a mock-up. Eventually you will see at the LSNC sites a lot of touches that we’ve been toying with here at Webdogs 3.0 for the last several months. By the time we get finished, all the LSNC.net sites will be HTML5, CSS3 and mobile havens for California’s legal services advocates.

We have already unplugged some of the LSNC advocate content, such as the cases summaries, which we dutifully posted for over five years, but have not updated since late 2009. (Not to worry. All the case summaries are being imported to the LSNC Advocate Feed site and you will still be able to search for them.) We are still in the process of updating or in many cases simply removing other content with long expired pull-dates. We are also adding (I think) commenting and a few other social connections.

As I like to say, stay tuned!

Other posts of possible interest...

• First take at responsive web design
• What our tech training survey tells us
• Trouble in River City
• The Race Equity Project rebuild debuts