General Information | Features of the Site | Locating Information
 Design Information

The purpose of this page is to give you some information on the purpose and design of this site.

General Information

This site is intended to put the residents, businesses and visitors of the City of Baton Rouge and Parish of East Baton rouge in touch with our government.  This site was developed as a Government only site, providing people with the resources we know best.  We realize some that visit our site are looking for a community portal so we list several of the local portals for Baton Rouge on our links page.  They generally keep a good listing of things like restaurants, churches, schools and organizations.

Features of the Site

We have incorporated several new features and layout changes to our site.  Each page of the site will have the same features and layouts.  We adopted this strategy to prevent confusion and keep the flow of the site consistent.

The City/Parish Home Page contains a navigation bar at the top, links to information in the grey area on the left and four sections of information in the body of the page. 

• The Around the Parish section lists City/Parish information and events that are going on throughout the parish.
• The Press Release section list actual press releases that were put out by our Public Information Officers (City, EMS, Fire and Police).
• The Live Traffic Accidents section lists the current accidents being worked by EMS, Police and the Sheriff's Office.  This information is updated once a minute, to display updated results on the home page you will have to refresh you browser.
• The Current Road Closures section is a list of closed roads that is maintained by the Traffic Engineering section of our Public Works department.

All other pages will keep the general style and layout of our home page.  All department home pages include a navigation bar at the top, address and contact information on the left along with links to information within their section of the site and a Mission Statement and Frequently Asked Questions in the body of their page.  Department informational pages will have the same look and feel.

Locating Information

There three ways to find information on our site.  You can use our Search Page to search our site for pages that contain a certain word or words.  If you know which department handles the information you are seeking, use our Directory Page.  Lastly, if you want to see a list of services we provide broken into categories you should search one of our Information Pages: Resident Information, Business Information, Visitor Information.  Each Information Page lists services that pertain to a certain user base and is grouped by categories.  If you select the Business Information page, you will only see services that pertain to businesses.  Some services server multiple user bases and will show up in each of the pages.

Design Information

The site was developed primarily using Internet Explorer 6 as a web browser.  While we also tested the site with Netscape 7, Opera 7.02 and Mozilla 1.0.2, there are some sections of the site that may not look correct using these browsers.

We use several icons through out the site to denote certain characteristics about hyperlinks.  Hyperlinks that have the globe symbol () are linked to pages outside of this website and are not maintained by the City/Parish's Information Services Department.  Links to information in Adobe PDF format generally have the small PDF icon () and in some cases the large PDF icon().  These documents can be viewed with the Adobe Acrobat Reader which you can download for free at Adobe's web site .  The secured page icon () signifies that the page will require a password.  This is generally information set up by departments for certain groups or individuals.  The department maintains a list of who can access the page.

Please note you may need to set the left and right margins or your browsers page setup to 0.25 inches in order to print information from the site.