City of Sparks Website Redesign

The Situation

The City of Sparks needed a website redesign and we needed to accomplish a number of things:

• Incorporate the new brand look and feel
• Reinforce the brand promise of "It's Happening Here"
• Reorganize an enormous website (thousands of pages) to make information easier to access and with fewer clicks
• Incorporate an easy to use content management system so the content could stay updated
• Develop a strategy and optimize for search engines
• Develop a dedicated mobile version of the site

The audience for this site posed the most significant challenge because they were so diverse and equally important. We needed to target: Civic, Tourism and Business.

The Approach

• Build on the Drupal 6 content management system (CMS) platform
• Mobile website m.cityofsparks.us (with auto-detection and full site capabilities should you want it all)
• Embeddable widget that pulls automatically from the City of Sparks calendar and full list of businesses/entities doing business in Sparks
• Social media mashup: cityofsparks.us/connect
• Email platform (no more hard costs for email sends, the CMS handles it all). This gives Sparks the ability to send out different newsletters to different groups through the CMS and simultaneously add extra information (picture galleries & videos) to update a social media release section of the website that people can go to for additional information
• Custom calendars with different view options
• Custom agenda and committee section that’s easily updated & automatic
• Facebook "like" buttons on all pages to help spread the word
• Follow new brand standards (colors, design elements, logo, tagline, etc.)
• Strong emphasis on events, calendar items, and news, along with large photos that relate to the brand look/feel, all to show the energy and uniqueness of northern Nevada’s premier event city — Sparks, where there is always something happening!
• Focused on usability and restructure of site architecture to find information faster and easier
• Homepage elements based on the most popular content from analytics
• Addition of an “I want to” area that combines an even more targeted approach to navigation
• Polls to engage with citizens and visitors

The Results

The new and revitalized look and feel was fully embraced in the website design. It shed the dull exterior of many government website and embraced a vibrant and active design and functionality. The homepage has multiple places that reinforce the "It's Happening Here" brand - from calendars to news to featured events. A prime example is the "It's Happening Here" widget, which is a major resource for people looking for special events, activities, shopping, dining, family friendly experiences and more. The widget is able to be shared across community websites, too. By simply embedding the widget code (directions are provided on the site), Sparks businesses, organizations and individuals can have a piece of the Sparks website fully functioning on their own site, blog, etc. The website also incorporated a social media hub, to allow people to view live feeds from the City of Sparks' Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts so they could keep up with what was happening in the city.

The site was reorganized with input from community and staff at all levels to make sure that a site was created that addressed what the community needed and wanted as well as priorities identified by the staff in the trenches every day. The mobile website was successfully created and designed to make browsing on the go a breeze.

• Site traffic since the launch is up by more than 40% year over year
• New visitor traffic is up by more than 50% year over year
• Since the launch, mobile traffic is up 27%
• Since the launch, 68% of website traffic comes from search engines, 16% from referring sites, 16% from direct traffic
• The City of Sparks website appears on the FIRST PAGE (and in many cases the first listing on the first page) of search engine results pages for many search queries, including the phrases we strategically optimized for: City of Sparks (dominating the page as it should), Sparks, Sparks Nevada, Sparks NV, Sparks Events, Events in Sparks, Special Events in Sparks, Sparks Calendar, City of Sparks Events, It's Happening Here, and Visiting Sparks.   
• The most visited pages on the site have to do with special events, city activities (Parks & Recreation), visiting and doing business (exactly the pages we planned the website to perform best for). 
•  Leading website traffic comes from Nevada (Reno, Sparks and Las Vegas) and California (San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles).