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Website Redesign Resources

Have you been tasked with redesigning your agency website? This guide is based on the steps put forth by the Oregon State e-Governance Board and includes extra resources to help you along the way.

Writing down your goals makes it easier to get agency-wide buy-in and support. It’s vital that you have clear goals and objectives for your redesign project.

The Employment Department tied their effort to the agency’s strategic plan and created a large project called “Customer Communication Improvement.” You can find the charter for one of Employment’s web review projects on GovSpace as an example.


Want to review a few more resources? Learn more about developing a Project Charter on GovSpace!

To know what content works and what does not, you need to analyze it. Basic tips and tools can be found on Usability.gov.

View one of the Employment Department's content audit spreadsheet.

7 Min Marketing - How Do I Conduct a Content Audit?

 

eBooks


Want to review a few more resources? Learn more about Content Audits on GovSpace!

Analytics tell you many things: how many visits your pages are getting, where visitors are coming from, how long they stay on the page, and where they go after they leave. This can tell you whether content is really needed, or perhaps is buried too deep in the navigation. The E-Gov Service Desk can help you gain access to the Google analytics for your agency.

Resources:

eBooks


Want to review a few more resources? Learn more about Analytics on GovSpace!

Top Task Management: Making it Easier to Prioritize by Gerry McGovern 

Listen to your customers, reflect on the analytics and consult your program staff—find out what they are want to do when they come to your website and build the navigation around those tasks. How would a user, using plain English, think to search for this task using keywords or phrases? Capture these in a spreadsheet and perform a task analysis.

You can still have program-oriented navigation; just put that in the “About Us” area, for example, rather than front and center of your site.

 

The Web Ahead Podcast - Top Tasks

 

Focusing on Customer Top Tasks with Gerry McGovern

As soon as you have many people chiming in on the direction of a website, you get disagreements, conflicting idea, and turf wars. What about what customers want?

Gerry McGovern has developed a specific step-by-step methodology for identifying what matters to your customers, focusing effort on those things, and objectively testing the performance of those tasks. Helpful and well-gathered data can quickly end debates and focus a team.

Gerry joins Jen Simmons to walk through the process.

Articles and Blog Posts


Want to review a few more resources? Learn more about User Tasks on GovSpace!

 

 

Card Sorting

Card sorting can and should change how you organize your website content. Let the users help you determine how to organize and label content and services on your website.  

By using a card sorting tool you can tell how to best organize your website for their benefit. This step helps refine or redefine your website criteria. 

Resources:

Usability

Usability testing is a required and crucial step in the development of your website. After you build out the basic structure of your website in staging, you will test it with real customers you identify. Usability testing can take many forms, from in-person testing to e-mail surveys. Choose the tool that makes the most sense for you and your customers.

Resources:

Shari Thurow's Elements of Website Usability

image from Shari Thurow's article Conversion Optimization: Measuring Usability In The User Experience (UX) – Part 1

 


Want to review a few more resources? Learn more about Card Sorting & Usability on GovSpace!

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