6.2 SR 09-16-2024 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Elk River City of Elk River Website Redesign Northern Lights Award Submission for Minnesota Association of Government Communicators Submitted by Starr Sorheim, Senior Communications Coordinator Tell about the problem or opportunity that prompted this project. List the goals you were trying to achieve. The City of Elk River's website hadn't been updated for over 7 years. The website experienced an ever -changing technological world, an audience moving to online services post -pandemic, and lack of updated branding. Additionally, the city had introduced an event center since the latest redesign which needed its' own branded site. The city has also pivoted to newer and improved online services for recreation programs, online licensing, and agenda management that needed to be better integrated. The previous site had over 1,200 pages which was dwindled down to around 200 pages, 1,202 unlinked documents that were deleted on the back end, and over 350 broken links fixed. With the redesign, we wanted a modern feel that better communicated the experience of being in our city. We wanted our residents, business partners, etc. to be able to navigate the site clearly and find what they were looking for. We also wanted a tool that was helpful for our staff to use when working with the public. Tell us who you were attempting to reach. Our primary city website, parks and recreation site, and community event center site are used by an average of 15,000 people each month. For reference, our city population is just over 26,000. While many of those users are in the local area, we have contractors, business developers, and visitors who use our site regularly. Our city has a destination park and regional park that attracts non-residents and our community event center hosts numerous events and tournaments for nearby cities. With this in mind, we needed our website to accommodate both residents and non-residents. Tell us how you measured the project's success. Before the redesign, utilizing Google Analytics was not the most successful method of measurement due to the abundance of abandoned pages, unlinked documents, and broken links. When a user would search for something, their results would come up empty — leaving them to search for the same thing multiple times. Now after the redesign, Google Analytics is useful and tracked monthly. Our communications team utilized Google to identify the top six searched and clicked pages to generate the main six buttons on each homepage. We also learned from Google that our search page is within the top three pages accessed monthly. When redesigning, we made the decision to lock the top navigation bar so users can easily search no matter the page they are on. In our social media analytics and Google Analytics, we could see how many users were visiting our site because of a social post. We began tracking those hits utilizing Bitty, but also referring users to specific calendar events or NewsFlash posts to better track the event or program we were promoting. With this tactic in mind, we designed our new homepage to visually show upcoming events and information in the header scrolling images and our new NewsFlash module. We also included a social media accordion that invites users to follow us on our platforms to stay up to date. This has greatly reduced the need for searching for event information as users can find what they need right when the site loads. Tell us how much money you spent and how many total hours the project took to complete. Who participated? What portion of the work was done by internal staff vs. external resources? The City of Elk River utilizes CivicPlus for their site. The redesign for our city and parks and recreation websites was free with our contract. The cost to upgrade our community event center's site to ensure appropriate branding was $1,650.65. Page 35 of 381