Coming to your computer or smartphone in the future: a newly designed, more functional and easier to navigate web page for the City of Vermillion.
Members of the Vermillion City Council took no formal action at their Monday noon meeting on this topic, but after hearing a report from Malachi Petersen, an administrative intern for the city, they agreed that money should be set aside this year to get the redesign process rolling so that the newly designed city website may launch sometime in 2018.
“This has been my pet project for the last few weeks,” Petersen told council members, explaining that City Manager John Prescott has noted that in the past, some city staff have looked at revamping the website.
“He sort of set me on the trail to see what a potential website redesign would look like,” Petersen said.
The city’s website, he explained, serves much the same purpose as the new welcome signs that have recently been placed near the main highway entrances to Vermillion.
“Our website is sort of the front entrance into what people first see when they google Vermillion,” Petersen said. During his presentation, the city’s current website appeared on a screen in the city hall conference room.
“In my opinion, it doesn’t really give off a signal that this is an attractive community of this is a community that is on the technological cusp of what’s coming next,” he said.
The city’s current website was designed in 2012 by GovOffice, a Minneapolis-based web design company specializing in government websites. The current website features links to various city department web pages, documents pertaining to city council meetings, city information and applications for various permits.
“We paid initially about $6,500 for the initial website design and we budgeted about $2,000 a year for the website maintenance cost,” Petersen said. “We’re currently limited at 2 gigabytes of data to be stored on the website.” Currently, the site contains about 1.7 gigabytes of data.
“That’s because we have over 1,100 pdfs and over 200 web pages currently on our website,” he said, adding that the “back data” of those pages contain generic descriptions, meaning they won’t show up when a consumer tries to find the information contained in those pages.
“Our search engine optimization isn’t that great,” Petersen said. “It’s not really designed in a way that allows content to flow from a search engine to our website.”
In a report to aldermen, he noted that the current website’s strengths and weaknesses.
Its strengths include a vast array of information that is hard to come by on some municipal government websites. This information includes agenda items and minutes from city council meetings, contact information for city departments and utility services and a tab for citizens with questions on how to go about setting up various services.
The current website’s weaknesses include a plain design that looks out of date, and its organization by city departments which makes it difficult for citizens who don’t know much about local government to find information they’re looking for in a quick manner. Some of the pages of the website are practically empty white space, he noted, aside from less than a paragraph of text. Photos of the community are non-existent.
Petersen’s report also states that documents, permits and applications on the website are also out of date, with many featuring various designs of the Vermillion City logo. Departments and other entities connected with the city have separate websites with inconsistent design and some of those websites aren’t linked to the main City of Vermillion website.
Two weeks ago, Petersen conducted a survey on the city’s Facebook and Twitter pages. It received 42 responses. Respondents noted that about 17 percent of respondents were satisified with the current website, 52 percent found it to be “okay” and nearly 20 percent were dissatisfied and about 7 percent were extremely dissatisfied.
“One of the other questions we had on the survey was ‘how would you rate your ability to navigate the City of Vermillion’s website to find the information you’re looking for?’ A lot of people said they weren’t really able to find what they were looking for – at least not quickly,” he said. “They had to browse around the website.”
The survey asked citizens to list what they would like to see added to the city’s website.
“Some people said that they would like to see things not organized in the way of city departments because even though you and I know which city departments do what here in Vermillion, sometimes residents don’t know, for example, that the waste department does things with recycling,” Petersen said. “People also said they would like more direct access to links regarding the city council, the mayor, etc., so they can quickly get to that information on how to contact you.”
In his report to aldermen, Petersen suggested features that should be included in the website’s redesign that focus on ease of navigation, citizen interaction and social media.
Navigation can be made easier, his report states, with a prominent search bar with a good search function. Petersen also noted a quick links feature that is included on the home pages of the City of Tampa and Baltimore County that would allow Vermillion citizens to easily find links to information on how to pay fines, how to report an issue and how to find permits and applications. These three categories are currently some of the most visited pages on the City of Vermillion’s website.
Better citizen interaction may occur, he suggests, if the city’s new website features two-way communication where city officials can easily get feedback from city residents. Petersen’s report recommends the city’s new website should also allow citizens the ability to report issues online as well as provide contact information on who to call to help with city-related problems.
He told aldermen that under the American With Disabilities Act, government websites are required to be accessible to everyone, including individuals who are hard of hearing and have poor eyesight.
“You have to have different, alternative tags on different things on the website, and our website currently doesn’t have that,” he said. “The federal government is not going after small town websites when it comes to ADA compliance … but it’s still important to have to make our website accessible to residents of Vermillion who might not be able to see or hear as well as the rest of us.