Probably more important than what it looks like are what it offers to Utah citizens and visitors. We continue to simplify things with the portal and part of that was eliminating the scroll in this year's version. Instead of having left side navigation buttons that take you down a parallax-scrolling site, we have used zoom to help drive users to major features. Each of the three main boxes zoom out to provide additional content: news services, location-enabled services, and Utah.gov highlights.
The top navigation remains consistent although our designer, Jonathan Higley, created all new iconography.
The next feature bar includes our latest Twitter post, a date featuring a top event for the day which is driven directly from Google Calendar (Utah went to Google Apps for Government in November), and a location selector (Utah.gov defaults to your current location and provides data and information based on that location automatically).
The Utah.gov Smart Search is one of the most important features and has access to the Master Data Index (MDI) which underlies all of Utah.gov. 1100 state online services, 1700 Utah government and education social media feeds (take a look at our Pinterest page and Google+ feed for example), multimedia, government agencies, and a wealth of other content types are all indexed by the MDI and drive how the content is provided to Smart Search as well as other places on the site, such as Connect.Utah.gov
We hope you enjoy the changes. With over 1,200,000 monthly unique visitors, we feel an obligation towards regular improvement. You've rewarded us by performing 31 million online transactions in 2012. Having citizens and businesses use Utah.gov's online services instead of standing in line helps us make state government more efficient. We'll keep working toward that goal.
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