An audience-first redesign of ysaqmd.org
Cleaner air for Yolo County and northeastern Solano.
The District regulates stationary air pollution sources, runs incentive programs that put real dollars into cleaner equipment, and tells residents when it's safe to go outside. This prototype puts those four jobs first — smoke advisories, burn-day status, permits and complaints, and grants — and pushes the rest into the background.
Why are you here?
Five audience landing pages replace the current department-oriented menu. Tap one to see how the redesign reorganizes around what you came to do.
Smoke is in the air
What today's AQI means for your health, what to do indoors, and which Cal/OSHA outdoor-worker thresholds kick in.
Can I burn today?
Don't Light Tonight residential wood-burning status plus agricultural and open-burn rules for the rest of the year.
Permits, complaints & rules
ATC and PTO permits, asbestos NESHAP notifications, complaint intake, and a permit-finder for regulated businesses.
Grants & incentives
$5M+ a year in clean-air dollars. Find a program that fits your school, fleet, ag operation, or home.
Community & EJ
Disadvantaged Community programs in Yocha Dehe, West Sacramento, and Rio Vista. Free home air filtration through Fresh Air For All.
What changed in this redesign
- Audience-first home page. The current site's "I WANT TO" dropdown is the best UX move on it — we promote that pattern from a buried last menu item to the primary structure.
- Real-time AirNow + Don't Light Tonight in the global header. Same as today, but never further than two taps from any page, with plain-English health advice paired with the AQI number.
- A working Spanish-language sibling page for Fresh Air For All, not a "Información en Español" link to a list of PDF titles.
- Native semantic HTML5 —
<main>,<header>,<footer>, skip-to-content link, keyboard-navigable everywhere — no overlay required. - Better native search (synonyms, PDF body indexing, faceted filtering), no AI features per FAQ #13.
- The third-party
unleashingleaders.comreference shipped in today's search form HTML is gone.
Why no AI on this site?
Per FAQ #13, the District is not interested in AI chatbots or AI-driven UI for this redesign. We agree with that call — the site's job is air-quality information, served fast and accessibly. The search box you'll see uses standard indexing techniques that close the gaps we found in our audit (synonyms, PDF body indexing, faceted filtering) without any LLM in the loop.
Today's air, at a glance
Davis and Vacaville are the two AirNow monitoring stations covering the District's most populated areas. Numbers below refresh from the same live AirNow feed as the header strip.
Davis (95616)
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EPA-grade reference monitor. Covers the urban core, UC Davis campus, and the ag-burn corridor north into Yolo.
Vacaville (95687)
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EPA-grade reference monitor. Covers NE Solano including Vacaville, Dixon, and the I-80 corridor. Backed by smoke-monitor and PurpleAir community sensors.
Don't Light Tonight
Burn-day status lives in the header strip
Residential wood-burning curtailment program runs Nov 1 to Feb 28. Year-round burn rules at Can I burn today?
$5M a year, going to cleaner air
The District administers grants and incentive programs that put real dollars toward cleaner engines, electric school buses, home filtration, and lower-emissions equipment. The current site lists these in a deep tree; the redesign puts them on one comparison page.
Walk through the redesign
The prototype includes working versions of the District's deepest information surfaces, not click-through placeholders. Each one is a working answer to a specific gap our pre-audit found on the current site.
Live audit
Accessibility comparison
Real axe-core numbers: current site 89 violations across 8 pages, prototype 0 across 20. Per-rule fix notes, methodology, and the audit script you can re-run yourself.
Real search
Improved site search
BM25 with synonyms and faceted filtering over a 34-doc prototype corpus. Try "report smoke" or "form 170" and watch the synonym expansion in real time.
Open data
Today's air, data hub
Live AQI, 7-day sparklines, PurpleAir community-sensor map, and two open-data JSON endpoints with no key and no rate limit.
Findability
Forms-finder
37 forms with multi-facet filtering by who you are, what you need to do, topic, and delivery format. No more downloading a stale PDF when a JotForm is waiting.
Brown Act
Board meetings
Next regular meeting promoted; eight most-recent meetings with highlight bullets and Granicus video links; committee cadences in one place.
Spanish
Aire Fresco para Todos
One of five Spanish-language sibling pages at the same URL depth as the English versions. Language toggle in the header switches between paired pages.
Why
What changed and why
Every redesign decision paired with the specific audit finding that motivated it. From → To → Why, organized by information architecture, accessibility, search, forms, data, and platform.