Project Work: Mt. Lebanon Municipality
Building a Community Website That’s Well Designed, Easy to Navigate and Accessible
Working with Mt. Lebanon Municipality to help design and develop its new website that launched just after Memorial Day has been an exciting opportunity and a great project for our firm.
Its previous website was built nearly 30 years ago when an employee there won a free website template which was used to build it. The site contained several hundreds of pages and was built on a templated municipality Content Management Platform (CMS). After decades of adding content, combined with limitations to the CMS, the site became unwieldy, and it wasn’t easy for people to quickly navigate and find the information they needed.
Mt. Lebanon put out a bid for its website, and Krakoff Communications was selected based on a number of factors including capabilities, design acumen, our team and overall value. Laura Pace Lilley, public information officer at Mt. Lebanon Municipality and the editor-in-chief of Mt. Lebanon Magazine, was our main client contact; however, we interfaced with many people at the Municipality including IT, public information and other departments as well as commissioners.
Laura and her team came to us with a list of must haves and requests for the new site. First, it had to be a custom design that was attractive and inviting to website visitors. We also needed to focus on organization, accessibility and ensuring a user-friendly back end to make edits and additions easily. Lastly, the site had to be completely customizable and one that can grow and expand for years to come.
We started with a streamlined architecture approach based on how people use and search the website, instead of how the Municipality is organized. Site visitor analytics and focus groups were used to determine what information was most important and necessary.
Now, if you are a current resident, business or wanting to learn more about the community, it’s very easy to find the information most pertinent to you. We also have quick links for the most popular items and a robust search function as well as a “How do I” feature. A chat bot is also being added soon. It’s also easy to see all the events taking place throughout Mt. Lebanon with a highly functional calendar. The goal is to allow people to use the site as efficiently as possible.
In addition to the municipality website, we migrated two other websites for the police and fire departments into the new design and architecture, which allows for one central site to be used instead of three.
When asked about working with us, Laura said, “The one thing we didn’t want to look like was a government website. We picked Krakoff Communications because they had a lot of experience building websites for a lot of types of organizations and companies, and they were an amazing partner for us.”
You can check out the new site. If you’d like to learn more about this project, listen to a podcast with Laura Pace Lilly where she shares a lot of interesting details regarding the new website at Inside Lebo.
