Website Editing and Restructuring
Building an Information Architecture System for a Local Government
From 2021 - 2022, I had the opportunity to completely overhaul and redesign the Town of Chapel Hill’s website for its Planning Department and Building and Development Services Department.
The Town operated with a decentralized content governance, since each of the Town departments was responsible for updating and maintaining the content of their own department’s web pages.
This structure explained:
Inconsistent page architecture and page styles between different departments
An unclear information architecture and an unclear visibility of system status.
Lack of cohesive color usage and style conventions, which ultimately meant a lack of user indicators
The Approach
The impetus for this project originated from the Building and Development Services Department’s (BDS) launch of a digital permit center. The department director and the Town’s communications team were preparing press releases, social media blasts, and web language about the transition from paper permits to online/web based.
As the Senior Planner in charge of reviewing zoning permits, I informed the Planning and BDS Department directors that:
“We are about to launch a brand new online service delivery on top of a broken website.”
The focus at that time was to add new information to the Building site, explaining the new online permit center. However, staff and the public had already noted the level of difficulty in navigating the Town’s website due to the redundancy of pages. It became apparent that there was not an intuitive location within the website to place the new permit center information, that could be easily found by the public.
I offered to perform a site content audit, create a redesign proposal, and make any agreed upon edits. The process of this work is detailed below.
Research for the Redesign
The research for this project included content audits, interviews of subject matter experts, and collection of customer feedback data. This project did not have a budget.
Content Audits and Interviews
I performed two content audits, one for the Building Department webpages and one for the Planning Department’s. In each of these content audit processes, I also met with colleagues (the interviews) from these departments to better understand the subject matter and learn why information was grouped in certain ways.
Customer Feedback Data
Because this project did not have an allocated budget, I did not have a means to compensate research participants. Thus, I did not implement a formal survey or interview program for customer feedback. Instead, I tried to make use of customer information that the Town was already receiving: complaints!
We had two existing sources of complaints/feedback: one being the public, and the other Town staff. Both the public and Town staff were reliant on the Town website as a source of information, and I merely started taking note of phone call complaints and complaints from colleagues.
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Building Department Content Audit
I found that the original site map for the Building Department:
contained redundant / duplicative pages, and inconsistent information across those pages .
had different pages for building and for zoning, with no connections between the two or explanations of how they relate. Zoning review was handled in the Planning Department, but there were pages in the Building Department explaining (though not fully) zoning review.
contained summaries of zoning ordinance language, but these summaries were not complete and therefore imparting potentially new meanings. The zoning code should in itself be a source of truth.
had many pages that were just lists of links. The pages would keep sending you elsewhere within the site, without telling you why.
Building Department Customer Feedback
The most prevalent feedback from public and staff both was that they could not figure out how to find what they looking for on the Town website.
Both staff and public were ultimately using the Building website to find:Project thresholds for permit requirements
Permit fee schedule
Phone numbers for site inspectors
The refreshed Building Department site map. The original department site had 32 pages, but now it has 8 pages.
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Content Audit Results:
I found that the original site map for the Planning Department:had groupings of information that were inconsistent with the content groupings found in the zoning code
contained numerous pages for some zoning topics, but was missing pages entirely for other zoning topics
contained outdated information and had pages for plans and studies that have since been withdrawn
The refreshed Planning Department site map. The original department site had over 150 pages, but now it has 51 pages.
A Proposed Governance
The content governance that was ultimately used for the Building and Planning Departments’ webpages, and that is proposed for the entire Town website, is as follows:
Page Structure
Content should be typed directly onto a web page whenever possible, instead of uploading a PDF.
The webpage can be translated by the user directly in the browser. PDFs would need to be translated into – at minimum – the Town’s 5 official languages.
Webpage updates are immediately visible to the viewers. PDFs, we have seen, are downloaded by the user. The user then does not revisit the page to check for updates.
The webpages become an easy to maintain source of truth for staff and public.
Content should be grouped into as few pages as necessary.
Content groups should be determined by a department, and the web page architecture should reflect the department’s content groupings
Each content topic area should have one page, if possible. Utilization of accordions can help shorten page length.
Hierarchy Indicators
Home Pages should have a banner image at the top of the page