City of Dover's new website design
We are very pleased to announce that the City of Dover’s new website is now live! Please check it out for yourself at www.cityofdover.com. We created a completely new design encompassing all Dover has to offer while increasing the functionality and making it easier to navigate for the visitor.
Delaware.Net, Inc. was chosen from 22 firms around the USA to rebuild four websites for the City of Dover Delaware. You might assume that we had an incredible advantage in winning this project, because we are located within the city. But you would be wrong. To keep the process fair to all bidders, we were not allowed to present our solutions for this project live and in person at the city’s offices. This was because the final four bidders were made up of us, and three firms from outside the state. There are several national web design firms that specialize in building municipal websites, much like we do. We know who the players are, and how their solutions work. This helps us show a municipality how they will gain a better solution from our company.
This was a very ambitious project, as FOUR websites that operate in the city were combined into ONE Content Management System (known as a Civic-Logic CMS). These websites included; the city’s website, the Dover Police department, the Dover Library, and parks & recreation. Each organization will have the ability to login to a centralized Intranet. This means that city employees will have access to a new web-based system for collaborating, sending mass emails, and managing their own respective websites.
The biggest challenge for this project was collaborating with all the different departments and taking into consideration each department’s needs and how to make their site more inviting and user friendly. From the homepage we have made it much easier to find what you are looking for with fewer clicks than the old site.
Another challenge to this project was that there was a requirement to build a design concept to show our vision for the project. Typically, it is a better idea to plan out the website’s structure before starting on design, but we wanted to win the project. So we built a design concept around how we would structure the site to take it to the next level for the city.
