The City’s website redesign objectives shall include:
- Greatly improve discovery and access of City information, collections, resources and content via internal search and external search engine optimization.
- Provide a seamless and integrated experience providing access to content and resources via a single, easy-to-use City-branded online environment.
- Create a user interface that is flexible to the citizen’s device context, be it desktop/laptop, tablet, or other mobile devices.
- Design a user-centric and easily-updateable solution for providing online-help for the City’s resources.
- Create a user interface that supports the needs of our citizens who require accessibility tools to use the site, incorporating the fundamentals of Universal Design, as well as aligning the new design with WC3 Priority 1 Accessibility Guidelines to provide optimal accessibility to our users.
- Provide guidance on industry best practices for translated content
- Align with our brand strategy with a clean, elegant, user-centric design.
- Create an organized, user-friendly back-end environment that will allow multiple City of Sheridan departments to post relevant news and updates to their relevant pages.
- Create a repository for multiple document types in order to promote governmental transparency. Media management is a critical component to this project.
Background:
In 2016, the City’s website was updated to its current iteration. This update incorporated visual updates that significantly impacted the visual appeal of the website, but kept much of the existing infrastructure of the site. In an effort to increase ease of access to information and services, the City has budgeted in its 2019 Fiscal Year for a complete redesign.
Administrators from each department within the City are responsible for maintaining their respective content. Turnover has led to many pieces of the website either out of date or non-functioning.
As a public entity, content management, archival of records and information transparency are a priority. The City is looking at innovative ideas for managing large amounts of resources and material for use by the public.
Scope of Work:
The City of Sheridan expects the project schedule to be informed by the Scope of Work listed below. The Scope of Work details major phasing for milestone delivery and invoicing. While this Scope has been designed to satisfy the objectives of this project, the City may consider suggestions for different or additional phase details. Note that the first three phases, Discovery, Design, and Prototype Page Design, are anticipated to take no more than 6-9 months.
Throughout the project, the selected Agency will be expected to attend key meetings onsite to communicate project status and findings.
For each phase, it will be required that detailed notes of meetings be recorded and presented as part of the project documentation.
The following are inclusive but not necessarily exhaustive lists of requirements and deliverables for each phase. If the responding Agency follows methodologies and process which includes additional or different steps, phases, or deliverables, please include that in your proposal response.
User Testing is expected at all applicable phases, and the testing deliverable will be in the form of a findings report for each applicable phase.
Discovery Phase:
The following is an inclusive but not necessarily exhaustive list of requirements and deliverables for the Discovery Phase:
Requirements:
- Performing onsite interviews to understand City’s mission, vision and key business drivers and how these criteria inform project objectives.
- Working with internal City teams, conduct a website audit which will be used to identify the core content, prioritize content, eliminate duplicate and outdated content as well as inform the user interface and internal architecture of the site.
- Working with the City team, identify and analyze the City’s online resources and their potential for integration into sheridanwy.net.
- Reviewing historic web analytic data to meet objectives.
- Developing a detailed project schedule.
Deliverables:
- Deliverable will include both a Findings Report outlining recommendations for meeting project goals and an outline of the proposed site infrastructure.
- Detailed Project Schedule.
Design Phase
The following is an inclusive but not necessarily exhaustive list of the requirements, desired features, and deliverables for the Design Phase:
Requirements:
- Conduct necessary user research and usability testing throughout the life of the project to achieve objectives.
- Redesign sheridanwy.net to modernize the design and user interface.
- Should use platform-agnostic standards for dynamic content elements such as HTML5.
- The design process will include review and revision cycles as needed to achieve approval of the final design.
- Ensure the user interface aligns with search engine optimization best practices.
- Develop new, refined information architecture which will:
- Prioritize content.
- Simplify discoverability.
- Provide the optimal user interface to our citizens.
- Align the new design with WC3 Priority 1 Accessibility Guidelines and the fundamentals of Universal. Design to provide optimal accessibility to all of our users.
- No proprietary systems are allowed in the building of the site.
- The City of Sheridan shall retain rights for all written content and all images/video developed for the site.
Deliverables:
- Detailed design layouts for all page and feature templates.
- Detailed functional specifications.
- Usability test results and related data.
Prototype Page Design Phase
The following is an inclusive but not necessarily exhaustive list of the elements of the Prototype Page Design Phase.
This list includes all of the deliverables necessary to begin building the site. Note that layers in documents must be clearly labeled and contain only the necessary assets.
Deliverables:
- Page Prototypes:
- Design, create and deliver files which serve as a non-functional Prototype for each page type.
- Design, create, and files which serve as a non-functional Prototype for each reusable component type.
- Graphic Assets:
- Layered-files for all necessary graphic assets.
- Style Guide:
- A comprehensive website style guide that can be edited by the City on an ongoing basis.
Support During the Building Phase
The following is an inclusive but not necessarily exhaustive list of the elements of the Support During the Building Phase:
- Review and Validation
- Implementation to be performed by our development partner and the City, with the Agency lending support as needed to ensure the integrity of the design.
- Agency to review prototypes of all page types in the staging environment during the Building Phase to validate integrity of design.
Launch and Post Launch Support
The following is an inclusive but not necessarily exhaustive list of the elements of the Launch and Post Launch Phase:
- QA and Testing
- Ensure integrity of design via robust QA and testing support through launch and post-launch.
Due Date:
August 31st
Address:
Agencies with strong creative departments include Finn Partners and Ruder Finn.