Office of Sustainability content transition

As we transitioned content from the original city website to alpha.austin.gov, we selected departments using a prioritization matrix that considered impact, lift, and department capacity. The Office of Sustainability was chosen because their team was excited about the new website, and had a strong need for our official documents content type.

Though alpha.austin.gov has a polyhierarchical information architecture and focuses on services rather than departments, you can start by checking out Sustainability’s department page.

My role

Establishing a relationship with stakeholders

I supported multiple department transitions for alpha.austin.gov, but for the Office of Sustainability, I was the lead. First, I performed a thorough audit of existing web pages and features and presented my findings to the department stakeholders. I made a strong case for:

• Addressing accessibility of graphics and images

• Archiving many low-traffic pages

• Fitting their content into our polyhierarchical IA

• Reworking content to be more service-oriented rather than department-oriented

Rewriting and reimagining content

Once we had reached agreement on how to proceed, and what the department stakeholders were comfortable with, I began rewriting much of the content, utilizing new content types, such as service pages and official documents. The Office of Sustainability has a lot of content that falls under the category of white pages or research papers and presentations. Some of these were eliminated, and the ones that were crucial to keep online were transitioned using the official documents and official document collection content types. The official documents content type allows authors to publish PDFs in multiple languages, along with a summary.

If there are multiple related documents, they can be grouped together using the collection content type. PDFs are generally a terrible user experience, but in city government they can’t be eliminated completely. For the ones that absolutely need to stay, the official docs content type is a very good compromise.

Onboarding stakeholders

Once all the necessary pages were written and published, I trained stakeholders on how to use the CMS, and conducted a workshop to educate them on writing for the web best-practices.