Easy Content Strategies for Your Local Government Website

Most local government websites require several website administrators to maintain content on specific sections. This makes sense as municipal websites are often deep with rich content which can become too much for one person to handle. Also, it is common for some departments to have their own unique requirements and a need to control their own identity. But with so many cooks in the kitchen, ensuring consistent and quality content throughout your website can be a challenge. That is why it is important to establish some ground rules, or what is known as a content strategy, for all web administrators to follow.

Content strategy encompasses all of the content that can be added to your website, from basic text to images to videos and more, and how that content is presented. With that in mind, below are some basic content principles and best practices to help guide your own efforts to establish “rules and standards” for your web administrators. You’ll notice a common theme, simplicity. So I’ll do my best to practice what I preach, and try to keep this simple.

A content strategy can keep your website from falling apart.

Review your content

First things first. Proofread, edit, update, and remove outdated information. This is perhaps the single most important rule for any content strategy. It will establish a baseline for where your content is and where it needs to be. If you adopt only one rule, let this be it.

Write for the web

The basic tenant of this rule is simplicity and here are the primary components:

• Create short, simple, relevant headings/section titles.
• Break up long blocks of text with paragraphs and bulleted lists to highlight the main points. This treatments is called “chunking”. It’s easier on your site visitor’s eyes and much easier to read. Using page or CMS Items (link) is an excellent tool for this. A lot of text is too much on the web.
• Use plain language for longer, more technical information. This is actually a good practice for any text on any section.
• Never underline text unless it is a link. It causes confusion for site visitors. Find other ways to highlight text such as bolding or italicizing.

Let the Content Management System (CMS) do the work

Every design has its own built-in combination of font types, styles, sizes and overall colors scheme. Since content editors function much like MS Word, it’s tempting to play around with formatting. But this is where trouble can arise as each administrator may apply different formatting styles to different areas. The easiest way to keep your content consistent is to let the CMS do the work.

• Use the default fonts and associated styles built into the design. If you decide to change any of these elements, be sure to decide as a group so everyone is doing the same thing.
• Add content directly into the CMS content editor. Do not create an external Word doc and then copy/paste.
• Only use ALL CAPS for a short title or if that style is built into the design headings.

Follow accessibility (ADA) standards

ADA guidelines are kind of a “twofer”. If you apply them to your content, you get a website that is both consistent and more accessible to all visitors. How can you lose?

Set a content review & update schedule

Admittedly this one can be a big challenge to establish staff-wide, but if it is, your content strategy just became that much easier to implement. Even if you just convene the web administrators once a year for a site review, that will pay big dividends.

Ensure new web administrators are trained

This isn’t a true content strategy principle per se but it definitely falls under the large umbrella of maintaining a professional local government website. Remember to have new web administrators trained on the CMS and the ways of your in-house web guidelines. Consistent content is the key to a great site. One errant admin and the whole thing can fall apart!

GovOffice offers a wide variety of content services to help keep your municipal website in tip-top shape. Contact us today to discuss your needs!

Where's Your Website?

Simple SEO Tweaks to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine's "organic", or unpaid, search results. In general, the earlier and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users.

The process of completely "optimizing" your website to appear (and perform well) in search engine results is quite complicated, but there are some easy ways to make improvements using the GovOffice CMS.

Here are some simple steps you can take to get started, and well on your way to improving, the search engine ranking of your GovOffice website. You’ve work hard to build and maintain your awesome municipal website. Make sure this valuable resource is available for everyone!

Essential Steps

1. Add a Title, Description, and Keywords to the backend of your website. We have seen many instances where a GovOffice website went from non-existent to the top of the heap in search engine rankings by making these changes alone.


2. Create Friendly URLs for sections. These are shorter Web addresses that are easy for search engines to understand, e.g. GovOffice.com/design.


3. Add Alt text and title text, to images and icons. This step is often overlooked as it is for more “advanced” users but fear not, this image text how-to guide will walk you through the process. Adding this text gives a label (a text identity) to graphic images which search engines love. Search engines don’t recognize images on their own. It also improves site usability and conforms to ADA Web standards.


4. Keep your site content current, dynamic and relevant. Create links to local organizations, businesses, etc. in your community or surrounding area. Like Friendly URLs, your links should be descriptive. Descriptive links are also easily understood by search engines and will help visitors find specific content they are looking for more quickly.

Extra Steps

1. Purchase a custom URL for your local government website, for the same reasons Friendly URLs are beneficial. They are descriptive and help identify your site. 


2. Done with applying the SEO fundamentals above and ready for the next level? Go nuts with MOZ's very concise, yet thorough Beginner's Guide to SEO.


3. After you have completed the implementing the first steps above, keep up with what what pages are being visited and what pages aren't. Our get started with Google Analytics guide will help you configure this "behind the scenes" monitoring of your municipal website activity. It's a great way to see your work in action!

So where is your website? It’s somewhere out there, but making these few simple SEO tweaks can bring it much closer to your intended site visitors.

Can you help these people find your city's website?

Need some additional SEO guidance? Contact us today, we can help!

New Website Exceeds the Needs of a Growing Community

The Village of Bolingbrook, Illinois has enjoyed substantial growth in recent years and as a result, they had outgrown their municipal website.

Coming to GovOffice as a new client, it was very important to them to retain their 100% transparency rating. Therefore, they hired our content professionals to ensure that all of their existing content was transferred and structured according to established Web design and usability standards and immediately “findable” for their citizens. We also added custom icons and an enhanced film strip to link directly to high priority information for even greater efficiency.

And of course, the site content is wrapped up in a high-end, engaging design that showcases the now and the future of this vibrant community. With unlimited pages, an updated CMS, and a streamlined framework, their new website is ready to grow right along with them.

When asked for feedback on their GovOffice experience, the Bolingbrook staff jumped at the opportunity to express their satisfaction.

An Easy Process

"The one thing that was missing was a website to represent what Bolingbrook has become. We looked at many companies to help with the website design but only one actually made sense for us. GovOffice made the entire process smooth and quick.  Not only did we get a top notch website that the residents could be proud of, but we got a website that was user friendly and visually appealing. Mike, Janelle and Ben held my hand the entire time and made me feel confident that we were getting a top notch product!" - James Farrell, IT Director

More Efficient Government

"Personally it is such a nice thing to be able to direct people right to the visible pay online button. In the past, I always had to tell people to scroll all the way to the bottom, look for the kids getting off the waterslide, and there to the right, in small print was the pay online link. Same applies to the FOIA requests. Having the garbage pickup information right there on the buttons is great too!" - Diane Kloepfer, Records Clerk

Better User Experience

"What a great experience working with your organization! Simplicity, functionality and ease of use and affordability! A complete package." - Steve Miller, PW

The Village of Bolingbrook (pop. 76,000) is a southwest suburb of Chicago spanning Will and DuPage counties. It is known as one of the Best 50 Towns to Live in the Country according to Money Magazine with a growing community of new homes, corporate companies, parks, and a healthy school district.

Had a great GovOffice experience? Tell us your story!

A Message from Our CEO

GovOffice 4.0 – the Next Generation is coming!

GovOffice was launched in 2001 as the centerpiece of a unique public-private partnership to bring website technologies to cities across America. Founding partners included the International City-County Management Association and League of Minnesota Cities and Avenet, which developed the GovOffice technology. Eventually, an additional 15 state municipal leagues joined our partnership!

In those 16 years, we’ve seen local government websites evolve from being a novelty to a necessity. We’ve served over 1500 local governments in 44 states and stayed true to our mission of providing state-of-the-art web technologies that meets the needs of local government at an affordable cost. Now, we’re excited to announce that we’ve initiated a major development initiative to create the next generation of our technology. The new GovOffice 4.0 will meet the needs of our local government clients and your constituents well into the future.

This major upgrade will be implemented in multiple phases, which will help users absorb and adopt to changes over time. User interface upgrades will maintain a priority on ease of use. Current sites will be seamlessly upgraded to the new system with no or minimal disruption.

Phase 1 results:

• a faster, more responsive Admin system
• even faster client sites (we believe our current sites already load faster than our competitors!)
• a new Search system
• refresh of the Admin look & feel aimed at enhancing ease of use
• a state of the art code which can be extended rapidly to add new features in subsequent phases

Additional incremental upgrades will rollout new content types to meet the unique needs of local government.

Subsequent phases:

• new file (photo) upload software
• eNotification/eAlert system
• New, more robust bulk-mail/messaging system
• Upgraded Superforms & ePayment
• Document management/repository
• Customized content types, like Council Packets/Agendas

The initial version of GovOffice was informed by a “beta group” including 30 cities across the country. We continue to value and seek your input and ideas on how to make GovOffice even better. Please share your thoughts on how we can better meet your needs on our feedback form. We’ll provide further updates along the way.

Thanks for being our client, and partners in preparing for the next generation!

A Quick Guide to Common Web Terminology

Effective communication with your Web solution provider will help ensure your website meets your goals and expectations. Something as simple as misunderstanding common terms associated with Web projects can steer a project off the rails. So we’ve prepared this brief guide of commonly misunderstood terms to help keep you on track.

Read on to ensure that your next conversation with your sales rep, account rep, or tech support effectively conveys your Web needs or gets your problem solved quickly.

Design

Web design consists of the visual elements of a website. These include the colors, fonts, banner images, general layout, and so on. These elements are consistent across every page. Think of Web design as the frame, or template, where you place your content.

Content

Web content consists of everything not included in Web design such as text or images in sections (pages) and the labels and organization of navigation menus. Content can, and typically should, be different on each page of your website.

Content Management System (CMS)

The Content Management System (CMS) is where you make changes to your website content. You can manage every aspect here, from creating new sections, to adding new text, to uploading documents, to removing outdated information. This area is also commonly referred to as the Administrative Dashboard, or simply Admin. The changes you make here will be instantly updated on your live site.

Live Site

The live site is the website that visitors see. It takes all of the content you create in the Admin and displays it according your website design template.

Navigation Menu

This is where the names of all of your sections (pages) are displayed in an organized manner. It will allow your site visitors to efficiently move between sections and easily access the information they need. The navigation menu can be displayed horizontally, vertically or both but must be consistent throughout the site.

Section (Page)

A section can also be referred to as a page as it is one individual "page" of content on your website. As you develop the content of your website you will create many new sections. Each section should focus on one type of content, for example, a section that only has Minutes & Agendas or another that only has Police Department information.

Site URL/Domain

This is your website address. It will most likely look similar to www.anytownusa.com but can be customized to an extent.

Homepage

The homepage is the introductory page (section) of a website and is typically the main page a visitor will find when navigating from a search engine. The homepage is used to facilitate navigation to other (interior) pages on the site by way of the navigation menus, quick links, promotions, and other elements.

Responsive Web Design

A responsive website is designed to resize and display optimally on any device; desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphones. It resizes dynamically and allows desktop webpages to be viewed in response to the screen size of the device. For example, if you use a smartphone to view a responsive website, the content stacks into a single column, delivering your content in a vertical scrolling layout.

Do these words make sense to you?

Other questions regarding Web standards and communication? Let us know!

6 Ways to Improve Your GovOffice Website

The Best of Our Best Practices, Vol. 1

The GovOffice CMS gives you the freedom to modify your website content any time (and almost any way) you want. However, with this freedom comes the responsibility of keeping your website up-to-date and well organized. With many demands on your time, sometimes making hasty updates is necessary and can do more damage than good; the cumulative effect being a discombobulated set of information.

When making recommendations for improving content and design to our clients, we advise them to follow our “best practices”. Best practices can be defined as professional procedures that are accepted or prescribed as being correct or most effective. With more than 15 years' experience developing local government websites, we have established our own credible set of best practices for making (and keeping) your city’s website a user-friendly experience for your citizens.

North Oaks's site visitors are a happy bunch

Here are six examples of “the best of our best practices” and how you can apply them. They are the fastest most effective ways to improve your GovOffice website right now.

Review your content
THE Cardinal Rule. Keep an eye on your page content – the text, images, sidebars, announcements, Items, and so on. Is everything up to date? Is that Fall Festival still being promoted in the middle of winter? Remove any and all content that is no longer relevant. Our Editing Toolbar is the essential tool to enable you to clean up, reformat and modify your content.

Organize your navigation
Limit your primary (first level) navigation menu items to 10 vertical and 7 horizontal. If your site navigation is unruly, your visitors will be overwhelmed. Don’t make them think! They want to spend as little time as possible on your site (sorry to say) getting the information they need. Follow this tutorial on how to move Sections to help organize your navigation menus.

Keep your Homepage clean
Following the previous points, get rid of the clutter. A clean, streamlined homepage is much more inviting and improves the utility of your website. A quality site begins at the homepage. However, well-intentioned Web Administrators make the mistake of thinking everything needs to appear on the homepage. It doesn’t. People will have no problem finding information as long as your site is well organized. Learn how to add Promotions to your site. It's one easy way to keep things clean.

Arrange your images
It’s fun to add images to pages and the can certainly add variety, but like other pieces of content, they can also be too much of a good thing. Follow our recommendations for placing images on your site. Make use of the included Image Gallery.

Use correct Content Types
The easiest way to arrange, format and display your website pages correctly is to use the right content type. Each content type is designed for specific information. For example, the Basic content type is useful for most sections that simply require text and images, the Events content type is used to display information that requires dates or a calendar, the News content type is best for displaying news and announcements. Let the GovOffice CMS content types do the work!

Update your design
Maybe it's just time to update your design. Nothing like a fresh start. You may want consider adding one of our Content Services too. We are the professionals after all and can help take some that workload off of your shoulders!

Need more help? GovOffice clients get FREE, unlimited Training & Technical Support.

Contact us to learn more!