FNSB Property Search

02 Mar 2021 - | Author: Laurin

If you’ve ever bought a house you would know how important research on a house is. In the Fairbanks North Star Borough there is a Property Database open to the public where you can see the assessment value of the house and therefore its annual property tax, as well as other important information.

Well, I was in the market for a house and trying to use this site on mobile is doable, but not fantastic. I had to use a gigantic scroll wheel to choose a street to search - and that was enough for me to volunteer to revamp the site.

I focused on 5 aspects:

1. It had to look modern aka Bootstrap.
2. It had to be user friendly. No scrollbars - instead I replaced them with suggestion boxes.
3. It had to be accessible. The html tags all had to make sense for a reader and the text colors needed to contrast with their backgrounds.
4. It needed to be up to the current FNSB website design standards, including color, font size, and accessibility guidelines.
5. It needed to be mobile-friendly. It did not scale to the device size, and the user would have to zoom in and scroll around instead.

Before I was assigned to updating this website it looked like this (yes that whitespace was there):

After I made my adjustments it looked like this:

I improved not only the look of the site, but the user experience as well, adding look-ahead suggestions in the textboxes, changing text color on hover, and paying attention to accessibility standards. Now the page is easier to use (I ditched the awful scroll wheel for the search by address!) and it also matches the FNSB uniformity standards.

Hopefully future home buyers and owners will benefit from the changes as I have.

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