The City of Fayetteville’s website, accessfayetteville.org got a bit of a makeover recently.
Julie McQuade, Community Outreach Coordinator and one of the managers of the website redesign project said that directives for the new design came out of meetings by Mayor Lioneld Jordan’s transition team more than a year ago.
“We wanted to give the site a more professional, fresher look,” McQuade said. “We got a lot of feedback from citizens through the mayor’s transition team about the website, and the new design is intended to address some of those items.”
Some of the changes include a new color scheme, a more prominent slideshow highlighting photos by the city’s volunteer photographers, an FAQ section to address questions from various departments, and a video tour book intended to make potential new residents “fall in love with Fayetteville before they get here,” McQuade said.
Also included is a video avatar feature, that allow users to view pre-recorded clips of a woman reading answers to frequently asked questions. McQuade said the feature came from a service offered by CGI Communications for free along with the video tour book.
Other changes include a searchable directory of city staff, a carousel beneath the photo slideshow that allows city officials to call attention to certain items on the homepage, and a reorganized navigation intended to make important information easier for residents to find.
“We heard from citizens that they wanted to be able to search for staff by name instead of by department,” McQuade said. “We also heard that citizens wanted more images, graphics, and information about online services on the site, so we tried to incorporate those whenever we could.”
Most of the work on the new site was done by city staff including McQuade and database administrator Scott Caldwell. McQuade said improvements to the site have been ongoing for about a year, but that the soft launch of the new design occurred on Feb. 1.
