Solution Goals
Risetime was asked to lead McHenry County’s efforts to redesign their public facing website and migrate existing site content to a new website platform.  This was to include a complete overhaul of the look and feel, as well as reworking the information architecture and navigation design. 

Key user experience goals included updating the look and feel of the McHenry County website, as well as implementing a consistent look and feel throughout the whole site.  The site had to be redesigned to facilitate easy navigation and access to the services users are looking for, as well as easy access to current site content such as current events, information, and job postings.

Solution Highlights:

• Establishment of a consistent look and feel throughout the whole site with straight-forward navigation.
• Configuration of an easy to use content management tool.
• Implementation of web forms that integrated with the existing intranet portal.
• Testing and verification of compatibility for the majority of operating system/browser/screen resolution combinations.
• Rendering of Flash and other multimedia content.
• Implementation of a site-wide search with meaningful and easy to understand results.
• Development of a self service approval workflow to facilitate the content creation, approval and publishing activities of over 25 departments and their 100+ authorized content managers.
• Enhancement of analytics capabilities through implementation and configuration of Google Analytics.

Solution Overview

For both residents and McHenry County employees, a key objective for the new site was easy navigation, content retrieval, and access to departmental contact information.  All 26 departments needed the ability to make updates to their sections of the site, with over 100 users requiring the ability to manage site content. 

Early on, Risetime led McHenry County’s project team to key user interface design decisions.  Several design challenges quickly became apparent, including the need to accommodate lower bandwidth users, comply with Section 508 guidelines, support more than a dozen operating systems/browser/resolution combinations, and maintain a consistent look and feel across the new website its “sister” sites. 

Through multiple iterations of design concepts that incorporated client feedback into each new design, a flexible set of style sheets were implemented to control the visual and interactive elements of the new site.  The use of style sheets, rather than creating multiple new master pages, has made ongoing maintenance of the site more efficient and less costly.

The redesign of McHenry County’s website required a thorough review of the current site structure and content transformation to maximize the logical organization of information so that site users would be able to quickly find the information and services they are looking for.  In addition, a significant portion of the old site’s content was migrated to the new site through the creation of reusable page components.  The new website was configured to be indexed nightly to keep the search up to date with new content.

New Features and Functions

Although the focus of the project was to create a new look and feel for the website that would make it easier for residents to find information and access county services, the new site also delivered many new features and functions:

• Surveys were made available for gathering opinions from site visitors.
• Job application submission forms were created that safely routed applicant information submitted by public site users to the intranet portal for HR staff to process.
• Board meeting calendars that provided frequently updated information and were easy for visitors to print.
• RSS feeds were added to provide added convenience for site visitors to stay on top of county news and events.
• Foreclosure listings that could be easily updated so people can easily find up to date information about foreclosures.
• Press releases from all departments were now viewable from a central site location.
• A content approval process was established along with a process for deploying content from authoring to the production environment in a safe and secure manner.
• Search scopes were implemented to control what content of the site is crawled, in what order, at what times, and how frequently.
• Existing analytics software was replaced with Google Analytics eliminating costs associated with updating and maintaining server based analytics software.

To find out more on how Risetime can provide similar high-quality results to your business, contact us.