Websites are one of the simplest seeming projects that can most easily get off course. Check out some of the below best practices to help set your new website project up for success.
First, what are your goals of building out a new website?
Although there are some general best practices, the goals will largely depend on the needs and dynamics in your community.
To figure out what your goals are, it’s important to collect at least some data (website analytics, surveys, etc) to help inform your decisions. This may come in the form of gathering and analyzing analytics from your current website: What are the main pages that people go to? Do you know what information people most regularly need? It may come from outside surveying, too – Do people reach out to a general mailbox or Clerk’s Office, etc where there are consistently repeated questions that could be addressed right on the website? Are people asking questions for things that are actually on the website, but clearly which they can’t easily find? Are there things that people wish were available on the website? Gathering information like that ahead of time from staff who interact with the public will help you set your goals for the site.
In broader terms, your website should likely accomplish at least these bare minimum goals:
1. Provide valuable information in certain areas, such as:
- Departmental services: Police, Public Works, Fire, Construction/Zoning/Fire Prevention, Recreation, etc
- Governance info: Governing Body and Committee memberships, terms, biographies, contact information, agendas, minutes, ordinances and related documents or videos/transcripts.
- Events and Meetings: Any governing body meetings, community events, or municipally sponsored activities or events. This should be in a format that allows people to easily add to their own calendar.
- Emergency information: Information on what to do during emergencies, an emergency signup notification, and during times of emergency, highly visible and organized information that can be displayed, such as a banner or ticker across all pages.
- Community/Tourism/Historical Information: It’s good to have information about the community available easily, location, history, key points of interest, including links to other local organizations or local business community organizations. For communities more tourism focused, for example, you might consider more information about parking, local businesses, bike lanes, transit options. For communities looking to attract new business, you might consider more information about business opportunities, redevelopment zones, business support contact info, etc
2. Have a way to “report issues” or “get service:” such as a 311 system, that allow people at minimum, to contact the appropriate departments for issues, and a system that ideally, allows people to submit requests into a work management system that your staff use to manage incoming work/service requests
3. Have easy contact information for all departments, governing body members, and other key officials
These are just a few examples of information you likely will want to include.
Before you purchase/contract with any vendor:
1. Create a small team with a clear point person to oversee the project. One of the biggest things that drives website projects off-track are “too many cooks in the kitchen.” Create a small project team, of no more than 3-5 people. You’ll want to assign a full-time staff person or paid professional to be the project manager. While familiarity with website development could be a benefit for this project manager, strong project management skills are actually the most important quality in the project manager, not tech experience. The project manager is not someone who is designing the website themselves, but rather someone who will ensure every stakeholder gets and participates the way they are supposed to, keeps the project on track, time, and budget, and communicates with the necessary stakeholders about the status. The project manager should be a paid staff/professional, not a volunteer, as they will need the ability to keep other officials, staff, and the vendor on track, and be able to commit to managing the project on a consistent basis. You will also need at least one person on the committee who does have web/IT experience. This can be a staff, elected official, or volunteer (or the project manager, if it’s the same person). You may also want to consider involving: One governing body member (who will be the liaison back to the governing body on the project), any communications related staff, someone from your Clerk’s office, and a resident/member of the public at-large or from a relevant committee.
2. Understand your needs and goals. Why are you pursuing this project? What are the problems with the current site? At this stage, what are the initial goals of a new one? Approach vendors with a clear set of goals for the new website, rather than letting their products frame the conversation. You may consider going through an expedited project planning process to uncover these details (goals, timeline, budget, etc).
3. Review vendors’ project plan beforehand. Although it is important to review the technical aspects of a vendors’ product or service, it is equally as important to understand how they organize and implement projects. For example, it may be a red flag if a vendor doesn’t have a clear or organized project plan or a readily available onboarding timeline. But a vendor with a thorough, and clear process for how they accomplish their projects on deadline would possibly be indicative of good process that will help maximize success.
4. Understand the cost structure. Your website should last at least three years before needing any major upgrades or redesigns. Make sure you understand the total costs for at least three or five years out, not just what you pay upfront. This would include costs for maintenance or service contracts, hosting, domain registration fees, SSL licenses, and ongoing revisions. Some companies offer discounts on multi-year contracts. Make sure an IT professional (staff or volunteer) has vetted the cost structure, and feels confident that you will be getting what you need from any service contract. You also may want to work with your CFO or a QPA to purchase multi-year contracts (some will allow those costs to be capitalized depending on the contract structure).
5. Review prior work of each potential vendor. It is critical to research prior work and check the references of vendors in this space, as you want to make sure that the website capabilities and services they are providing worked well for other communities, or that they can deliver what they actually promise to, which is not always the case. I have found that various companies aren’t tightly connected between the “sales” department and the “tech” departments, and that in some cases, the “tech” people were unaware of what the sales people were promising. Reach out to prior clients and their project staff to get real feedback directly from them on how their projects went.
6. Understand the process for ongoing editing and maintenance of the website. It is critical to understand how updates to the website will be made, who can post news articles, how emergency alerts are added, and the process for remedying technical problems that may arise. Ironing out all of these scenarios ahead of time will save tremendous headache down the road. Some things to understand, in terms of responsibilities and associated costs are: a) who is responsible for providing regular updates to the website, including adding calendar and news items, b) how are emergency alerts/banners created or added (for example is that available to you 24/7, by mobile device, etc), c) who can update a design or non-content aspect of the website, and d) who handles technical problems with the website?
7. Set a firm deadline for the project. Website projects often fall behind schedule because of issues with some of the items mentioned here. Ensure you have a firm deadline and detailed timeline that shows a clear path (with buffer) to meet the deadline. Both the deadline and timeline should be agreed upon by all stakeholders involved. Having that in place will help keep everyone on track.
8. Don’t use friends or volunteers. This can be tempting – when a resident or colleague offers to put a website together at minimal expense. This almost never ends well. Not only do you want a formal Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees you performance of the website, server uptime, customer service response times, etc, but you don’t want to put a resident or volunteer in the position of failing to meet the municipality’s needs. Oftentimes, these kinds of projects work OK for a few months, but rarely in the long run.
Following those steps in putting together your project will help avoid some of the most common pitfalls. Remember, you may do a website once every few years, some website companies are selling hundreds or thousands per year.
When you get to the point of planning your new website, keep these thoughts in mind:
Use available analytics and data to shape the new website. If you do not have analytics software on your current website, investigate whether it is possible to install. Even a month or two of analytics is better than nothing. Understanding how users interact with your website can be very valuable (e.g. how often pages are visited, which links and pages are use the most, whether people get lost looking for certain items, etc.). Using analytics data, rather than peoples’ personal beliefs about how the public uses the website, will provide accurate evidence to support decision making and guide the project successfully. Reviewing the analytics data on an ongoing basis can provide you with useful insights about the community that may not otherwise be understood.
Create responsive/mobile versions. Websites these days must be able to automatically scale to different screen sizes. Vendors should build in this “responsive design” as part of the project. Your website should be fully functional on a desktop, tablet, or mobile, and compatible with all major operating systems. You may have the ability to create or have a mobile application, but that should only be in addition to a mobile website, not instead of it.
Plan on additional revisions or upgrades. Not only is it worth planning for minor upgrades or additions of new features every so often, having a proactive schedule to organize and triage smaller issues with the website may reduce ongoing maintenance costs. Planning reviews of the website six months or one year after launching may help reduce delays of the initial launch due to small details that can hold up the process (The last 1% taking the longest, etc). Additionally, instead of making ad-hoc changes as feedback arises (which can be expensive and time consuming), it allows you to gather feedback then and review it a more formal, organized fashion at predetermined dates.
Purchase an SSL and use a .gov address. Have your team’s IT expert review the security features provided by vendors. One way to ensure that your site is more “secure” and user data is protected is to use a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) on every page of the site (https instead of http). This helps protect the data transmitted on the site from hackers, identity theft, etc. Additionally, using a .gov address gives you access to various security features provided by the federal government, which oversees .gov provisioning. While this function can cost more, it helps to build trust in the municipal brand. (You can keep your current .org, .com, etc address that people know, and have it redirect to the new .gov site)
Incorporate language translation and ADA features. Every website is legally required to meet ADA requirements (which your vendor should be familiar with). But you can go a step further in providing modern accessibility features, such as translating the website into other languages. This is especially important if there are non-English languages spoken in your community. Using the free Google Translate or similar plugin can meet most of the translation goals, and although the translation accuracy is not 100%, it’s surprisingly good (and continues to get better). Keep in mind text within images will not be translated automatically. Other translation services are often available at a cost.
Carefully review the current site, but don’t necessarily start from it. Although you want to perform a review your current site, which may include evaluating analytics data, or conducting user surveys, you don’t necessarily want to use it as a starting point. Rather allow yourself to start from scratch (or best practices from the vendor) and see where that gets you. You can then compare what you come up with to your current site to see if you have missed anything. But doing it this way allows you to break out of assumptions that may have been unintentionally built into how the prior website was made so that you are not just creating a “new version” of the same thing.
Incorporate local photography and artwork. Some websites rely on images as part of the design. Rather than licensing or using free stock images, go local! Research local artwork or photography to digitally showcase on the website. You might ask professional artists to donate their work in return for exposure, solicit submissions from community members, or host a contest. Make sure to properly license and/or attribute all of those great images!
Remember, this is not a step-by-step guide to creating a new website, but rather some important points of information to keep in mind as you pursue a new website. This can be a relatively easy and beneficial project, if kept on track, or it can become expensive and a frustration for many stakeholders if delays or budgets are exceeded. Follow some of the best practices here and you won’t be disappointed!
