LTC 346-2013 Website Redesign MIAMI BEACH
OFFICE OF THE CITY MANAGER
N o. LTC # LETTER TO. COMMISSION
TO: Mayor Matti Herrera Bower an Members f the City Commission
FROM: Jimmy Morales, City Manager , -, r I
DATE: September 11, 2013 �_ ' co
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SUBJECT: WEBSITE REDESIGN C D
This Letter to Commission is intended to provide you with information on our contibuett�pfforts to
improve the City's website. As we have previously reported, our website has been undergoing
continual improvements in an effort to improve usability, with a goal of not only providing access
to information the public wants and needs, but ensuring that it is provided in an intuitive manner.
In addition, standardizing webpage templates to ensure the City delivers consistent branding
throughout the website is also addressed.
Consistent with this effort, we put together a Website Focus Group comprising of City residents
and departmental representatives to review award - winning governmental websites to develop a
new streamline design for the City's website. The selected group of government websites have
won awards based on their commitment to providing their constituents with unprecedented
access to government information and e- services excellence. Some of the websites reviewed
were as follows: Orange County, Miami -Dade County, City of Doral, and Austin, Texas.
Within a three -month span, the Website Focus Group worked on a new design that eases
navigation and streamlines the information. The City's E- Government Administrators will work
with departmental website content editors to begin the process of converting the old templates
and content to the new design template.
As part of this new design, we worked with Mr. David New, City's ADA Committee Chairman to
review the content which is progressively more ADA accessible, revising the portals (Residents,
Business, Visitors, Government, etc.) to make sure that most commonly accessed information is
more easily available. Mr. New tested the links and provided feedback on descriptive text to
pictures in order to provide ease of use for ADA visitors.
These recent improvements will be implemented September 13, 2013, which will provide a new
design and navigation, enhance the templates to include the reflective capability to display on a
mobile device in order to make a selection of web pages mobile capable and provide an ADA
accessible Captcha on the contact forms.
As always, we welcome any additional suggestions to improve our website.