The new city website project wants to put the customer in the middle, according to city manager Murray Totland.
“It’s about making sure it’s successful in a variety of platforms particularly mobile devices,” Totland said. “Whatever we can do to make sure our customer can easily access our website … and hopefully use it beyond just getting information from the city.”
Totland and the website redesign project steering committee recently released a Request for Qualifications. The committee has laid out specific goals and priorities of what they want to see on the website and how they want it to serve the public.
“We go to the market and ask interested parties to tell us what your qualifications to do this work might be and we might potentially get 20 or more submissions,” Totland said. “Then we’ll shortlist that down to potentially five and then we actually invite them to submit the formal proposal.”
In a report to city council on June 24, the project steering committee laid out several key objectives they’re looking for from vendors. Objectives include a digital strategy that supports the new website and integrates it with mobile devices, user-centered navigation on the site, the site needs to be flexible so that it can grow to meet different needs down the road and have more opportunities for communications between the city staff and the community.
Vendors across North America will try to put their best foot forward and try and crack the top five and show the steering committee their best-practices. The top five vendors will then make a formal presentation to executive committee, who will ultimately decide who get the tender.
Dave Mosher is a software and website developer in Saskatoon. He said he’s considering putting something together for the new Saskatoon.ca, but he hasn’t prepared anything formal just yet.
When asked about the project’s aim to revolve around the customer and the smartphone, he said he would like to see that taken one step further.
“I would say that the smartphone is one screen size that you would want to target. When you're building a modern website, you'd want to be targeting different screen sizes so that the content they’re delivering is consumable in different screen sizes,” Mosher said.
Mosher said once the city decides on who is awarded the project, he hopes that in the end the development process is open to public consultations with frequent demos, making it visible to the public as it is a publicly-funded project.
“The biggest risk you have when accepting a bid from someone is that they're going to go off and work in isolation or in conjunction but there's nothing to be seen for three to six months and that's not an effective way to deliver software,” Mosher said.
Mosher made a presentation to city council earlier this year when the websign redesign was announced. He said since then, he’s happy to see the steering committee’s concrete ideas such as the desire to embrace accessibility, open formats and expanded eServices on the site as well as a focus on performance and enhanced navigation.
With the Request for Qualifications out in the vendors hands, a request for proposals is expected to be sent out to the top five vendors in August with consultations beginning in September and a visual design process beginning in October.
Totland stressed the new website, which already has about $1.2 million budgeted for the project, will have to be easy for the public to access. And he has some ideas of how it could serve the people of Saskatoon.
“One day I would like to see your smartphone kind of be your entire entry into city services,” Totland said.
“It could be everything from your bus pass to paying for parking to using apps to access city services and it could be all sorts of things.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): François Biber
Quelle/Source: cjme, 05.07.2013
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