Hack for Hire: Oak Park Seeks Website Overhaul

Oak Park's official government website has become a big, digital spiderweb and village officials are looking to hire an ace designer to make it easier to navigate.

The goal, officials say, is to bring the Oak Park website a step closer to becoming a 24-hour Village Hall.

Village spokesperson David Powers, who's spearheading the effort to find an "interaction designer," said Oak Park's 10-year-old government site has “compounded” from its original 200-page design and swelled to more than 1,000 pages. 

The site's accumulated content complicates visitor searches, and makes drab work for government officials charged with updating pages.

Some 1,800 unique daily visitors use the site, which includes pages for, among many other function, parking ticket payments and appeals, breaking news, and human resources.

Government administrators use the site to publish board agendas and minutes — but not before Powers names, formats, converts, saves, and posts the files. “It gets really tedious,” he said.

Hoping to simplify things, Oak Park issued a call in late August for a skilled web designer to produce a more navigable interface and, more importantly, renovate the site's content management system.

“We want to add more fingers,” said Powers, who pictures a site where government workers self-regulate pages.

This being Oak Park, officials are hoping to woo a designer to create a municipal site that's out of the ordinary. Other cities and townships, such as Des Plaines, use special government web design companies to create their sites.

But Powers describes designs by these companies as “web-sites-in-a-box," suggesting a cookie-cutter approach won't cut it in Oak Park.

For its original web site design, the village paid Oak Park-based Purple Monkey Studios (now part of Chicago's Bridgeline Digital) $19,000 upfront, then an additional $29,000 as the project expanded.

This time around, the estimated budget for the makeover — which includes consultation from the “interaction designer," concocting a clean design and creating the new site from scratch — is $75,000. The reason for the budget increase, Powers wrote in a memo, is the “growing demand for interactivity,” both by government workers and residents.

In addition to the municipal website, residents also through social media. The Village of Oak Park has an active Facebook page with 2,882 fans and a Twitter account with nearly 830 followers.

Leslie Boehms, Oak Park's social media coordinator, says the Facebook and Twitter pages function as public forums where residents can receive updates and ask questions. She sees the web site working in tandem with social media, and says she too wants a website overhaul.

“We do want to be one step ahead of what other governments are doing,” Boehms said. “The residents kind of demand that we're ahead of the curve.”

Interested? See the attached PDF. Officials are asking qualified candidates — those with "more than just web design experience" — to email their "qualifications, experience, cost and timeline to complete this scope of work" to vopnews@oak-park.us

The deadline to apply is Sept. 30.