By David Garrick, The San Diego Union-Tribune
San Diego will unveil today a significantly upgraded city website that officials are calling faster, more user-friendly and better designed for mobile devices.
"This website was designed by San Diegans, for San Diegans," said Mayor Kevin Faulconer. "Every line of code was written to help you find what you’re looking for and complete tasks faster, representing another major step forward in our work to make your city government more efficient and effective."
The site also includes a new public records portal to make it easier to seek city documents.
The portal will also include responses to other public records requests to make such information available to everyone. In addition, it will track how long it takes the city to respond to requests.
It’s the first redesign of the city’s site, sandiego.gov, since 2012. But officials said this upgrade is much more significant because it replaces a content management system San Diego had been using since 2002.
"We were using the Web equivalent of ancient technology," said Jen Kuhney, a member of Faulconer’s staff. "What we have now is a city website that is not only modern from the inside out, but was created with an unprecedented amount of community engagement for a major U.S. city."
Nearly 6,000 people provided input during the redesign process through surveys, focus groups and workshops.
The goal was finding out what residents actually want, instead of city staff deciding independently how the site should function.
In addition, the site wasn’t designed to discourage people from leaving, like many commercial websites. If the best way to fulfill a request is directing someone to another site, that’s what will happen, Kuhney said.
The site was also designed to work well with mobile users, who make up one-third of those who visit the city site. Visitors to sandiego.gov increased from 17 million in 2014 to 20 million in 2015.
The new site catches San Diego up with other major California cities that have made similar upgrades, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco.
It cost just under $650,000, about half the $1.3 million the City Council budgeted for the project. The money covered moving 7,000 Web pages, a new content management system and the community engagement process.
Local company Elevator Agency designed the site and another local company, Hopscotch Labs, conducted the community engagement.
Maintenance costs for the new site will increase to $192,000 per year. City officials said they’re still calculating how much higher that is than the annual maintenance costs of the current site.
People who have bookmarked individual pages of sandiego.gov won’t need to reset their bookmarks, officials said.
©2016 The San Diego Union-Tribune Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
