TEAM 4
Good Site
The URL: http://www.placer.ca.gov/ 
Title: Placer County Home Page -- Placer County, California

This site uses an attractive color scheme: white background, black text, green links, brown vlinks and black alinks. The color scheme and theme are consistent throughout the site and the combinations are very readable. Each page has an attractive banner with a link picture that takes visitors to the home page. The use of graphics is effective and appropriate to the purpose of the site.

The content on the Placer County site is clear and consistent. There are no broken links, that we could find, and the site is easy to understand and navigate.

The site includes critical features: a search box at the top of each page, alternative text for graphics, a navigation bar at top and bottom of each page and contact information at the bottom of each page. This site is obviously well maintained as we note that the last update was made on October 5, 2001. Credibility is further confirmed with the inclusion of copyright information. 

We ran the "Home" page, and "About our county" page through Bobby. The site failed the evaluation with a priority one violation of "Alt Text for Graphics". However, we note that the graphic that is not annotated is the green ball (bullet point) icon. We believe that this may have been an oversight on the part of the developers or evidence that they did not understand the importance of annotating all graphics. Bobby made several other suggestions for improvements, but this was the only priority 1 item that prevented the Bobby approval.

Even a great site like this has a couple of things it might
do to improve:

1) The events page http://www.placer.ca.gov/visit/events.htm 
is long. It can be improved by having "top" buttons through the page, and perhaps at the bottom.

2) The beautiful graphic of wild poppies is documented with ALT text; however, it does not say that it will take you "HOME". Less web-savvy folks might need that prompting.

3) ALT text for the "Ball" icon should be included, even though this graphic does not provide any content.