Pflugerville Launches New Revamped Website For Under $60K

PFLUGERVILLE, TX — City officials on Wednesday unveiled the municipality's new website, with an overview of the new site and redesign process scheduled later this month at the next city council meeting.

"I’m very excited about this launch because it includes a number of firsts for Pflugerville: fully mobile templates, extensive user testing, new subsites, and it incorporates the city’s active social media and videos prominently into the site,” James Buratti, digital content web specialist, said. “We are delivering a sophisticated user and mobile-friendly experience that our residents expect when they open up a website on phone or tablet or computer.”

In addition to the redesigned main site, three new sub-sites have been added for Parks and Recreation, Library and Utility Billing, officials said. The Parks & Rec section has news, events and information specifically related to the department while the library portal features greatly expanded information related to events, news and library content. The utility billing section takes residents to information about bill payments, water conservation, trash and recycling schedules and welcoming information for new residents.

Citizen feedback and web data indicated parks, library and utility billing as the three sites most frequently visited by website visitors, yielding the three new sub-sites designed to provide an easier method to access these popular links. A robust custom search makes all online city information accessible from pflugervilletx.gov.

A modern website has to be mobile-first and the new site design is no exception, Buratti said: “Currently, up to 60 percent of our web page visits are made on mobile phones, and that is only going to grow. The new websites all have mobile templates making mobile viewing a great experience.”

The new homepage incorporates special events, social media, news and video in new ways. Buratti held numerous user testing and feedback sessions with Pflugerville residents, before, during and after the site’s redesign, according to a city news release. The tests focused on building intuitive navigation and ease of completing common tasks for residents, such as finding contact information or looking up an event, officials added.

“We’ll continue to test the site and make improvements," Buratti said. "No website is ever complete. Technologies change, how we use it changes. You can always make it better.”

For the last two consecutive citizen surveys, the city website is the number one city-generated source for city information and news, officials said. The city began work on this redesign and platform upgrade more than a year ago after the last revamping that took place in November 2011, according to officials.

The entire upgraded package — content management tool use, three sub-sites, information transfer and redesign — were implemented for under $60,000. The council members will address the website changes at its March 14 regular meeting.

>>> Image via Shutterstock