City, county plan website updates
Planned revamps aim to benefit users. Entities hope to make it easier to access content and services.
Dayton and Montgomery County plan to revamp their websites to improve user experience,
The city of Dayton and Montgomery County plan to revamp their websites to improve user experience, make information easier to access and offer sleeker and more eye-catching features and designs.
The city has used the same website since 2007, and the county’s website has not been upgraded in about six years.
The information on the sites is accurate, officials said, but visitors may have trouble finding answers to their questions and both domains contain some outdated links. Sites must evolve to meet users’ expectations and needs.
“Certain things get stale, certain things get old, and we’re just giving it a new look and making it user-friendly and attractive,” said James Alford, Montgomery County’s director of data processing.
The city of Dayton’s website had many elements that were cutting-edge when it was released in 2007.
But today, the website is hard to navigate and it is not responsive, meaning it comes up the same way whether viewed on a desktop or laptop, tablet or cell phone, said Toni Bankston, a city spokeswoman.
That’s a problem because of the 45,000 people who visit the city’s website each month, more than 30 percent access the site from a mobile device, Bankston said. Many city documents are in PDF form, which cannot easily be accessed using certain browsers or mobile devices.
“If you are on your phone looking at our website, it’s kind of hard to find stuff, because it is scaled to be on a desktop,” Bankston said.
Accessing content and services needs to be easy and intuitive on all platforms, Bankston said.
Unfortunately, visitors often need to be familiar with the structure of local government to find what they are looking for since they must click on the correct department pages, she said.
Dayton’s website consists of about 438 web pages, and some departments have external sites.
The city put out a request for proposals in 2014 for a new site. But the response from vendors fell short of expectations, and the city retracted the request, officials said.
After more research, the city recently issued a request for qualifications from vendors, and about 14 firms responded. The next step will be seeking proposals.
The city could spend tens of thousands of dollars on a new website, based on what some other cities have spent redesigning their sites.
The end goal is to have content and a web presentation that is more cohesive and uniform, because information currently is scattered across numerous sites and pages, Bankston said.
The search tool needs to be more helpful, because currently the results include every page or document containing the search terms, Bankston said. Enhancing the search function will produce more relevant web pages, including the most commonly search for items, she said.
The city’s most popular web page is the police portal, which contains the crime map.
Other popular pages contain information for permits and basic information about city departments.
The city hopes to roll out a new website by the fall and to regularly add new features and content.
The city right now is surveying residents, visitors and workers about how they use the city’s website and what type of information they seek. The survey asks users to rate their experiences paying bills, looking up collection dates and accessing services.
The county’s website garnered considerable praise when it was first unveiled, but it is due for an overhaul, said Alford.
Some content and links on the site are old. Its visual presentation and design is not particularly striking. The virtual tour of the Animal Resource Center is a slide show of photographs taken in 2006. Other jurisdictions offer more interactive features.
County officials are working with the vendor to give the site a makeover. Officials have reviewed the web pages of other governments to identify design elements and features for the improved site.
The plan is to unveil the new site by late summer.
The upgrades should make county data and information more easily accessible, and the content will be presented in a more consistent and visually appealing format, Alford said.
In 2014, the county’s home page had almost 994,000 unique visitors. It received nearly 61 million views.
Alford said the county’s website functions just fine and records and data are easily accessible. But he said the site could use some cosmetic work.
“It’s still a workable site, and you can maneuver around it pretty easily,” he said.
Last year, while running for a seat on the Montgomery County Commission, former Dayton Mayor Gary Leitzell publicly criticized the county for having links on its website for budget documents that did not work.
County officials said Leitzell could not access the documents because he was using a certain browser, and the links worked on other Internet applications.
But Leitzell, who lost to incumbent Dan Foley, said the county has a responsibility to better manage its online content and make sure residents can access important information from any platform or application.
Leitzell said he also used to “troll” the city site in search of dead links to report for removal. He said it was a chore to get the city to keep the commission’s board pages up to date.