City Hard Launches New Website

Palo Alto’s new city website has emerged from beta and gone live, the city announced Tuesday.

At midnight Tuesday morning, visitors to cityofpaloalto.org were taken to a cleaner, more customizable interface—the product of many months of work by City Manager James Keene, the citizen volunteer Website Advisory Committee, and other city staff from 13 departments.

During the site’s two-month beta phase, nearly 5,000 users clicked through to check it out. 

“We handled the transition from old site to redesigned site with this ‘beta’ site approach to ensure ample opportunity for community comments,” said City Manager James Keene. “We were delighted to get so much useful feedback from the public during the ‘soft launch’ period. Working with our Website Advisory Committee we came up with a great initial redesign and thanks to the added community input in the Beta, we’ve been able to make the final website even better.”

Palo Alto has a goal of improving access to information and City services for residents, businesses and visitors. The website was born of that ideal. 

“We’re happy to put our name on the new website. Residents on the committee worked hard to do a good job, because we knew our friends and neighbors would not be shy about giving us feedback!” noted John Raftrey, a member of the Website Advisory Committee.  

“We set out to make the website more visually engaging, more interactive and easier to navigate. We feel we achieved those objectives,” said Bob Harrington, another Advisory Committee member.

The new site offers a more accessible, better organized, and more interactive user experience than the last one, and city staff will continue updating its content and navigation in the coming months.

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