City revamps Web site
For those of you that don’t read the Holland Sentinel, I thought I would point out that I was in an article today entitled - City revamps Web site.
The city of Holland has revamped and redesigned its Web site in an effort to make it more user-friendly and accessible to residents.
It was nice to see the Sentinel wrote up a little something for the launching but too bad that they didn’t use anything I said in the interview.
So what did I say?
I explained how I helped the city work on their compliance with Section 508 and how we went about researching each department along with various Holland residences on what information people needed to get from the city and how often.
I explained the amazing amount of time we spent on Information Architecture and wireframing to help us think through each section of the site. I explained why we went with the design we did and the backend system integration to help them manage their own site.
The problem was Roel Garcia (the writer) hadn’t a clue to what I was talking about and hadn’t even viewed the website before calling me. A majority of his questions would have been answered by simply typing the address into his browser. Along with this came the ever so classic example of - “Most people haven’t a clue what it takes to really develop a website” and this was painfully obvious during the interview and the search for facts.
To Roel Garcia and his readers - they just think I looked at what they had for a few hours, came up with a few designs and we put the content into the design. Maybe it’s not that big of a deal but I personally would have like for people to know we did our homework and provided a strong strategy that not only provided a great website for the community but a structure/system that allows for years of growth.
The Price
The price was close but they did end up spending more money with us to help them get a little further. I should also point out what we actually did for them and say it was a great price for all they got.
The Deliverables
- Client & Audience Discovery
- Sitemaps
- Wireframes
- Content Strategies
- 3 Designs
- Coding of templates in CSS and XHTMl (compliance with Section 508)
- CMS setup
- Elevator Up Hosting
- Training
What they did was build the site out which was a handful for the technology team - primarily Doug Nibblink.
Overall, It was a great time and we had a lot of fun. The city even wrote me a little letter of recommendation.
Elevator Up made sure our website redesign and content management implementation was a success. They helped us better understand the importance of information architecture in the pre-design phase of our website, which made a big difference in the end result.
Aaron and Paul really went the extra mile to make sure the site design met our needs both now and in the future. I also appreciated Aaron’s passion for usability, which is especially important for a government website.
City of Holland, MI
ethan Says:
Looks great Aaron. Wow. I had no idea you were working on all these projects…
See you in two weeks!