The LDOL Louisiana Department of Labor Web Site has big problems. This web page purpose is to document the problems and stark defects and suggest completeing the service and add features lacking that are available in commercial job-seeker web sites.

Points of Contact at LAWORKS:

Deborah Taylor/LDOL <DTaylor@ldol.state.la.us>
Carlos Bailey/LDOL <CBailey@ldol.state.la.us>
ITDC@ldol.state.la.us
ORS@ldol.state.la.us
sgoodbee@ldol.state.la.us
jodom@ldol.state.la.us

The State of Louisiana Department of Labor LDOL knowingly and intentionally denies service and refuses to respond to numerous requests to rectify the defects in the Web site.

The LAWORKS.NET site is not working as it should which is denying services to citizens including employees of LAWORKS.

Intentional denial of public services is probably a crime or at least unethical.

LAWORKS could do much to at least supply services that are offered free to the public by commercial job -seeker sites like email to applicants job opportunities from the job-seekers profile criteria.

Some glaring defects...

1. LAWORKS.NET Home page contains nonstandard Multiple header and footer METATAGs which cause many Browser problems.

2. This highly scripted page takes almost 3 minutes to load on many computers.

3. After saving the page to the hard disk, it will not run without a connection to the server indicating the page is client dependent. This runs contrary to sound client/server practices.

4. LAWORKS.NET has been designed to only work with the Netscape Browser. This browser is not available to at least 10 percent of current computers

5. There is a problem with the site secure digital certificate preventing secure use of the whole site.

6. The drop down menu is not usable because it disappears as soon as the pointer moves off the menu bar making the home page unusable.


7. When you go to the FULL TEXT version of the site and attempt to use the Job Search page you get the following error ... Of course the screen shot below is in error which renders the text pages unusable.

http://lavos.laworks.net/timeout.asp


8. Following are suggestions made to the State authorities in February 2002

The pages you have for selecting regions look nice but are too cumbersome. The graphics are not needed. A simple text list of choices will do. This will allow the choices to load more quickly and eliminate several graphics pages that the user must download every time just to get to the place they want. The idea is stream the data to the user as fast as possible with as few pages as possible. It is OK if there are a hundred things to choose.

When someone wants to look for a job, your system is too restrictive. It needs to list as much information as possible. To stream a single small table with no details is wasting time for the user to have to click on every link in the table just to discover what the link means. Go ahead and stream each entire job description or at least a truncated version. If you look at the code size of the pages you are streaming, you are wasting bandwidth and download time on streaming complex graphics but the data is held back. Turn it around. The user is not interested in images, they want as much information as possible, use your bandwidth to stream the data. Since the data is mostly text, you can afford to stream 100,000 bytes of data instead of 100,000 bytes of images. Do not hold back the data, send all of it in large-cell tables.

The search criteria is too restrictive. When someone is looking for a job they want as much data as possible. Allow someone to look at all the jobs available in a certain region or keyword if they choose, do not restrict the criteria unless the user wants restriction. Do not restrict the criteria without the option to allow the user to see everything available at once. This will make the system much friendlier. Open up the data stream so that the user can decide what they want. Do not use the server to restrict the data, use the server to provide as much information as possible. It is OK to stream text pages that may be several screens long. Since text is very efficient this is desirable and effective. This will eliminate much of the work the Job Center workers have to do in trying to get the users the information they want.

When streaming Job information, make it printer friendly by placing all of the job description on one screen (25 lines) with the option to access longer descriptions if they are available. Do not use frames or scripted menus in the job description pages. Allow a user the option to place all the job descriptions in a search in a continuous stream. By only allowing a user to stream job descriptions on a single page forces the user to navigate up and down and frustrates them to have to repeat searches and navigation.