We are excited to provide a sneak peek of our new city website that will be officially launching in late June. This redesign has been a major undertaking aimed at delivering an exceptional user experience for our diverse community.
The preview showcases the modern interface, streamlined navigation, enhanced search capabilities, and mobile-responsive design that puts access and ease-of-use at the forefront. You'll also get a glimpse of new features like the Get Involved landing page for community engagement and reorganized program information - all while experiencing the thoughtful accessibility and consistent design that ensures an inclusive digital experience for everyone. We look forward to your feedback on this work-in-progress that will soon be the new face of our digital services.
Our key goals are:
- Meeting strict accessibility standards
- Mobile responsive
- Ease of navigation and consistent user interface
- Clean, scrollable, searchable content
- Helping citizens find content quicker by predicting their needs and intents
- Building the website on a more secure platform
Home Page
We want a home page with changing imagery that showcases our beautiful and diverse world-class city from tourism to entertainment to business to activities to government transparency.
Whereas our current site really promotes a Search First philosophy, the new site gives multiple ways to navigate from big mega menus organized by topics to intent based “I want to” selection menus throughout the site highlighting actions our visitors may be wanting to take, to an easy search tool.
Landing Pages
If the navigation menu wasn't enough, each topic will also have a landing page with colorful cards leading to content.
I Want To
Where we really want to help our site visitors out is to provide them quick access to the actions they came to our site to perform.
I want to >> insert verb >> insert action …
For instance:
- I want to REGISTER for Water Citizens Academy (link to registration)
- I want to VIEW all upcoming public meetings (link to public meeting calendar)
- I want to REPORT a pothole (link to ScottsdaleEZ)
- I want to LEARN ABOUT bicycle safety (link to safety tips)
We will have some primary actions on the home page (based on analytics) as well as more detailed and specific actions in content areas throughout the site.
Search
But still important is SEARCH, the standard way to find what you are looking for on a website. The search icon is still at the top of every webpage in the upper navigation and ready for a quick click.
- Typeahead (while you are typing, it is providing options based on live content)
- Synonyms (you may be searching for a term that does not exist on a webpage, but we have programmed in synonyms to deliver you results anyway)
- Results that can be sorted by: news / webpages / documents - get the results you want!
This is a sneak peek to let you see what we've built, to explain the goals and to get your feedback on what you see so far. We will be building out the rest of the city content (it's a lot! 1000s of pages) over the next three months and you can expect a cutover to this new website in late June.
Now let's take you on your own tour
Since content is still being built and images added, it's not 100% ready for prime time. Some images are merely there for placement. See a bunch of blue box cards? They will be filled with images soon. Do not spend too much thought on imagery but rather organization and function, which is what we've been concentrating on to get us to this point.
- Go to Pilot.ScottsdaleAZ.gov
Your journey begins! - Use Navigation and Find Something.
Navigate to Purchasing and then check out Services & Programs, Procurement Process and Online Portal. You’ll see how pages with longer content are easily scrolled through the “On the page” right-side navigation. - View a landing page with different content types.
Click on the “Your City” navigation and select Codes & Ordinances. You’ll see how we have different cards to break up a lot of content and links. Big visual cards for the primary code links and then smaller alphabetized cards for additional code information. Scroll down to see a listing of document links. - Learn about a major City Service, like Scottsdale Fire.
Visit Fire and see how it all comes together. At the top is the intent based “I want to” tool highlighting actions that a site visitor might want to do in that section. Big visual cards link to other content. A news feed. A message from the Chief and embedded Ask the Chief form. Links to important department documents and station locations. - Use Search and Find Something.
Click the magnifying glass in the top navigation and enable site search. Search for “Trolley Maps” and see that as you type, you are offered options that you might be searching for within website content and documents. When you hit enter and receive search results, see that you can filter those results by webpages and documents (and news/events in other searches). - See how we can bring content from other sources into the site.
Navigate to Seniors and then visit the Granite Reef page. The Activity List is coming from a SharePoint list maintained by staff, how cool is that? Go back to the main Seniors page and check out the feed of senior specific events from the main city calendar. - Go from page to page within a section.
Visit the Community Facilities Districts section. You may start at DC Ranch but the “In this section” drop-down allows you to go to other pages in that same category of content. - Check out some other sections that have been built on the pilot site.
Events
Finance
City Attorney
Engage with Us
Transit System - Finish your tour? What do you think so far? WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!
Go to Speak Up, Scottsdale, create an account (or log in), and fill out the website questionnaire.
Thank you!!