Here’s the bumph from the City. Tell me what you think when it comes out.
The City of Vancouver will unveil its new website Wednesday, August 8.
More than a website refresh, this is a completely new website—built from the ground up with modern tools and methodologies to create a new, user-centred City and Park Board web presence.
The highlights of the our site start with its radical redesign. We started with a vision for serving citizens better—whether they are looking for information or services, or wanting to engage with us online.
Staying true to that vision meant conducting extensive user research into what information people want and need. We also analysed great government sites from around the world and looked at best practices for user experience and content strategy. Using all this knowledge and understanding, we developed the new vancouver.ca as a our new platform to build and improve over time.
We hope our citizens and site users will discover a site that is easy, intuitive and enjoyable to use. We think people interested in how we’re making it happen behind the scenes will want to know we’re:
Employing a robust content management system to stream information to different sections of the site with minimal intervention,
· Incorporating the Google search appliance, and working with an SEO analyst to optimize the findability of our content,
· Adding social media components, starting with Facebook events and Flickr accounts, to create more integration of community information,
· Using our own Open Data catalogue to produce consistent, easy-to-use Google maps,
· Integrating all our recreation programs into one database—searchable by time, type, location, age and date, and
· Working closely with 311 call centre to ensure people have access to the consistent information and services regardless of the channel they choose.