Hi guys – I’ve been away for a while due to a new little project I’ve immersed myself in… while we have kept putting off the need to redo our website as we focused on delivering really challenging projects for the past few years (Abu Dhabi permits portal, Houston migrated off a mainframe in 90 days followed by their public portal), I finally made the decision last month that enough was enough of our sorry old site and we would upgrade before the Fall conferences….
Our current sad site by the way is http://www.govpartner.com and I oversaw the last upgrade about 7 years ago and am the first to point out all of the things that are just less than desireable about our website… so no hurt feelings if you have feedback on the current site 🙂
I would imagine that many of you can actually relate, bc while my firm provides the management systems that are presented to the public on existing websites (we don’t design sites, we deliver the transactional public portals, e-permitting, rec reservations, commerce functionality, etc) it seems like every conversation I have with a CIO or CTO these days ends up with them confiding that they too are in the position of “I know, I know, we need to update our website and the public complains about how it looks, but we just have too many ERP, transactional projects in the pipeline to deal with aesthetics right now….)
But we’re biting the bullet and doing the upgrade in 6 weeks and I am not exactly looking forward to the ordeal (I’ll post something about that whole experience — I think we hired a really good design / consulting firm to work on this with us, and we are already used to break-neck delivery schedules from our own clients!)
WHAT I WOULD LOVE to receive input from all of you on is this: What are the main things that government employees / industry leaders look for when you visit a software firm website?
We have had great success with our webinar series and want to feature those with links for people to download previous recordings so they can see the software in action… we’re thinking case studies and client quotes are important… what is the main thing that you would all want to take away from a site like this though?
Thanks so much in advance for your input, and anyone else going through website redesign / SEO, contact me as I would be happy to share our experience 🙂
Gotta go now, yet another conference call with our design team…. Gabriela
Just saw “Ask a Design” expert on GovLoop home page, very cool — I will likely have a few questions over the next few weeks on this project 🙂
Oh – and I forgot to mention, I received two voicemails already from fellow GovLoopers recommending web design firms — thanks so much, but we already hired the design firm. I just need to give them guidance on what to feature on the homepage, etc and that’s what I am hoping to get insight from you on…. THANKS AGAIN!