First of all, congratulations on the new site design, good clean, uncluttered look that makes everything easy to read. As a webmaster of a big intranet and a public sector website, I'm well aware of how much work goes into something like this, so well done to you and the team. However, I'm also aware that some things get overlooked and the todo list never ends! Here's a couple of usability things for your long term wishlist once you've solved all the immediate issues.
1. You have no index to articles. If you 800 articles and the only way to view them is like a blog, in reversed chronological order, 3 or 4 articles per page and paginated with 180 pages, what are the chances that anyone is ever going to click through to page 134 to find the older articles? You need various ways to browse and sort (such as alphabetically, by some kind of tag or category) and it would be helpful to provide a view with just the titles without the bulky exerpts all on one page. If you rely on pagination or search as you do now, those older articles are not ever going to be found - which would be a pity for such a wonderful archive of content.
2. The auto rotating home page image slider/carousel. Some people love these kinds of automated features. However, there is a ton of industry research/testing that shows they cause problems. Many people associate attention grabbing moving, jiggling page elements as similar to spam - it is a distraction they want to blank out as it subconsciously reminds them of promises of having one a new ipad or the lottery if only they click through in the next 10 seconds.... Many people defend themselves against such unwanted distractions by mentally blanking out not just the animation but also the surrounding area causing them to miss important stuff.
Possible solutions are very easy - provide player controls such a stop or pause button. In fact, ideally you do it the other way around: have the slider choose a random static image every time the page loads and allow the user to choose whether to click through images or turn on the auto rotate function themselves. Empowering the intelligent user is very important on the web, similar in many way to having cameras with proper controls under photographer control rather having everything automated with an iA or green square mode....
These niggle aside, great job, Gang!
Regards
Dave
