Website Redesign and Text Notification System

PAIN POINT

The Village’s website was about seven years old when the Board approved our request to redesign at the end of 2019. It contained the typical problems of an older local government website – namely, outdated information and a static design that did not allow us to make major edits even as the organization changed. When I started in Oswego, two things about the website kept me up at night: The fact that only one person in the organization was capable of updating the site, and the site’s security in a moment when ransomware attacks against cities were increasing.

Another problem keeping me up at night? The Village lacked a workable text notification solution for notifying residents about emergencies, and buying one was not in the budget for at least two more years.

Complicating the issue, the old site had been built by a local web design firm that was owned by an active leader in the business community, who was nonetheless not capable of producing a site that met the Village’s needs. In addition to developing a modern website, I had to convince my Board to vote for the big out-of-town company and help both the Board Members and the local business owner save face.

SOLUTION

I immediately cross-trained two other employees on the website’s administration and worked with our IT Director to properly register the site to the Village rather than the developer to ensure continuity.

When the Board allocated funds for the redesign, we formed a selection committee that developed a highly specific rubric for evaluating website development proposals. This gave us concrete data for our recommendation to the board to buy from the out-of-town firm.

Most importantly, I developed a strategy to help our Board to defend their yes votes for the new firm while minimizing reputational damage to the old, local firm. We proposed packaging the website purchase with the purchase of a text notification solution produced by the same out-of-town vendor. By emphasizing the potential for integrations with other Village needs, the Village President was able to rely on the need for the integration and score a political win by publicly negotiating a bargain and moving up implementation of a critical public safety need in the community.

OUTCOME

The Village has a modern, secure website that is highly customizable and can grow with the Village’s needs at www.oswegoil.org.

As a result of the RFP and negotiation process, I also implemented the text notification system a full two years prior to its initially budgeted timeline, which gave us an important tool for communicating with residents during the pandemic. We give residents the control over what kind of news they get, whether they get texts or emails, and also whether they get in-depth news as it happens, or a weekly digest. All our communications link back to our website as the central repository for all of Oswego’s news and information, and I work constantly with the vendor to identify and advocate for new features, two of which have been rolled out to all their customers since the launch of this site.

I have also made it a point to maintain a working relationship with the local web developer, who continues to work for us on smaller, less critical websites for events and other uses.

Rollout of the new site also included a shift in organizational culture and responsibilities that tasks every department with ensuring the timeliness and accuracy of their content. Every department now has a staff member who is trained and responsible for content.

A walk through this website

You will see several intentional design choices on this site that you may or may not have made yourself and that would not be in line with the recommendations of your Communications Plan. Our committee identified different goals and priorities for our website based on Oswego’s organizational goals, and any site that I would help Glenview develop would be based on Glenview’s organizational goals.  

Design goals

A couple goals laid out for this site’s design were:

• Clean, modern design featuring beautiful images of the community

• Search-centric, to allow residents to get in and out quickly

Oswego’s team placed an emphasis on efficiency. With that goal, a high bounce rate would only indicate that people found exactly what they needed on the site via a search engine and did not need to look any further for the information before logging off and going back to their lives.

Content management, training, and integrations

What you don’t see by looking at the front end of this website is a powerful content management system on the back end that gives the Village’s communications department considerable control over the site and allows staff members of all technological abilities the tools to easily maintain the content on this site.

The site’s CMS also includes integrations that allow us to push new site content out to social media channels and via email and text. For example, when our Purchasing Manager posts a new RFP she has the option to automatically send a notification out to vendors with a single button, rather than log into a different email system, design an email, and send it out separately. Again, this reflects the goal of efficiency the organization had for the site.

Still in progress

The site officially launched at the end of December, and though its improvement over the former site cannot be understated, I am still working with my team to address weaknesses and maximize the site’s capabilities. The site’s organization and page count improved significantly over the previous version of the site, but several internal pages will still be condensed, reorganized, or redesigned to better convey the content and add more visual elements. Also, many of the best features of the site are still being implemented – our social media feeds are still a work in progress, and I am training staff on an integrated online forms solution to replace PDF forms, to name a couple examples.