The Engineer Rejoins the Fold

After a three-year hiatus, I am happy to welcome the Engineer’s office back to the collection of websites that I manage, giving me a grand total of 73 public and internal web applications. (With more already on the way!)

The Engineer and his team have a lot of things that they use their site for, and even more things they wanted to do. I worked with them to develop an online application that makes their lives easier and – more importantly – improves the way that they communicate with the citizens.

A Site that’s Easy to Update

The most important thing on their list was the ability to edit their site whenever they wanted, without the delay of working through a web team. The in-house content management system that my team built from the ground up gave them all that and more, allowing them to update their site even from the field. That aspect is crucial for the department that handles snow removal during winter storms.

A URL that’s easy to remember

To push the release of the previous website, the Engineer went out and got a new URL: www.CCEO-OH.org. After listening to their needs and addressing their concerns in our kick-off meeting, my top priority was to return them to the far more easy to remember www.ClermontEngineer.org.

This URL will be a main portion of their promotion of the site at the upcoming County Fair.

Road Conditions at a Glance

Their old site featured a home page that was a large graphic of a map, but it didn’t really tell the users anything. Once the URL issue was settled, I worked with the team on developing a consistent methodology of updating their home page with new information. Content modules include road repair and closure announcements, in-depth road announcements during emergencies, quick links to popular pages and graphics that quickly tell users the status of county roads.

The goal is to tell the users what they want to know as quickly as possible.

Green initiative

Now that we’d made the users’ lives easier, I shifted the focus inward. We identified several processes by which users would download paperwork, print it out and mail it in. In an effort to both “green” the operation as well as to save time and postage, I developed completely digital processes for citizens to apply for permits, request a county map and to report a problem.

Related posts

1. Even More Communication
2. What is the Content Management System?
3. Knowing the Answer
4. Combining Web Sites
5. Re-thinking Their Approach