Challenge

The Municipality of Anchorage is the largest city in Alaska, comprising almost 40 percent of the state's population at nearly 290,000 residents. Because of the challenges of living in Alaska, the website is an invaluable tool for providing government information to the residents, directing them to both local and state resources.

The Municipality has over 30 departments, and each had a different approach for content management. Over 300,000 pages of content had been generated using several custom content management systems; the information technology department wanted to standardize on one platform, Microsoft Sharepoint.

Process

  • Over 20 internal and external stakeholders were interviewed personally to understand the needs of both residents and municipal employees
  • Nearly 30,000 pages were reviewed during a content inventory process.
  • High level personas were created by using internet and personal interview research.

Solution

The final set of documentation included:

  • A high level site map of the previous Municipality of Anchorage site.
  • A new site map that described an ideal approach to create navigation that was more task-based.
  • A new home page that was more task oriented for three core audiences: residents, businesses and visitors.
  • Over 15 templates configured within SharePoint for content creators to use, which dramatically increased productivity for city departments.
The final visual design of the website matched the information architecture provided to the Municipality of Anchorage web development team, and surveys of the local citizens saw increased satisfaction in communicating with their local government.

Downloadable Deliverables