Redeveloped City Website

We’re preparing to launch a newly redeveloped City website powered by the Sandy Springs Unified Platform. The new site will go live at the beginning of July and will be a foundation for the ongoing development of SandySpringsGA.gov.

Why the change?

With the old City website, we had no control over functionality. Our site was skinned to look unique, but it was actually a branded copy of every other government site hosted by the provider. In 2020, the City partnered with the provider to beta test a development tool that enabled our in-house developer to give the site’s homepage a visual refresh. But that is where the customization ended. There was no way to change the functionality of the underlying site, or break free of the restrictions imposed.

Benefits of the Unified Platform

The Unified Platform was developed by the City to address the needs of our staff and our community.

Create Once

As technology fragments our audience, our staff have found themselves posting information across multiple platforms. The multiplicity of work wastes staff time and can lead to inaccuracies in public information. The Unified Platform allows staff to create content once and publish it to multiple websites and digital signage. SandySpringsGA.gov will be the third site built on the platform, and there are two more sites in development that will go live in the coming months.

Work Where You Work Best

Many Departments in Sandy Springs work within specialized Software as a Service (SaaS) systems designed to cater to their specific needs. These systems include Spektrix (ticketing), Bonfire (procurements), CivicRec (program registration), CivicClerk (public meetings), ADP (recruitment). In the past, staff had to copy information out of these systems to the City’s website in order to make it public. Last year, the City integrated Spektrix with the Unified Platform, allowing event information to be automatically distributed to websites and digital signage. The City also developed a system to automatically display Bonfire procurement data on digital signage, allowing us to maintain State compliance without manual input. In the coming months, we will be working on a project to automate the transfer of CivicRec and CivicClerk data to our Unified Platform network. These types of integration projects are an exciting challenge for the City as we are the first government to utilize emerging open data protocols in this manner.

What to Expect at Go Live

Homepage

The homepage will be similar to the current site’s homepage. Remember that 2020 homepage refresh? We were planning ahead! New homepage features will include a news feed, an event feed, a featured content component and a more visually engaging footer section. Unlike previous iterations of SandySpringsGA.gov, all home page content will be updateable from the Unified Platform with no knowledge of coding required.

News and Events

Topical information is where the Unified Platform really comes into its own. If you want an event to get noticed, create it in Unified Platform. Not only will it appear on the City’s website, but algorithms created by the Communications Department will automatically display it in other relevant locations throughout the Unified Platform network. We encourage all employees to create content. Don’t worry, all content will be checked by editors before it is published.

New event and news specific templates will improve the user experience. The filtering system has been brought over from other Unified Platform websites and improved to be more powerful. It allows the user to see all news and events or concentrate on what they are interested in. We’ve worked on the call to action logic for events so that Spektrix originated events automatically route back to CitySprings.com in a new tab for ticket purchasing. We will work on similar functionality for CivicRec originated events during that integration.

Promoted Content

Does your content need a promotional boost? The new City website will launch with a number of promotional areas. You can request a promotion with just a couple of clicks and a combination of algorithms and editorial oversight will ensure promotions find their way into the playlist. Whether your content is an event, news article, place or even an informational page, it can be promoted. In the coming months, we will be developing new, topic specific promotional areas to catch the right eyeballs at the right time. Plus with the Unified Platform, you are not just limited to SandySpringsGA.gov promotions. You can request a promotion on other network sites. The Unified Platform’s image processor allows you to upload a single image and set a focus point that enables you to control how your promotional image will display on different websites and digital signage layouts.

Mobile Experience

The mobile experience on the previous iteration of SandySpringsGA.gov was shaky at best. And yet half of the 30,000+ website users each month are visiting on their phones. Every part of the new site has been designed taking into consideration the experience you will have on a mobile device.

Search

The search system has been brought over from CitySprings.com, but it underwent some improvements on the way. The new experience makes it clearer what type of content is being returned and will link directly to documents. The upgraded experience will be ported back to CitySprings.com and Inside Sandy Springs in the future. This is just the beginning for search. Presently search only indexes the site a user is on. But what if content resides on a different Sandy Springs website? A Sandy Springs Unified Platform network-wide search is currently in the planning phase, although this is a big project, so it will have to be funded in a future budget year.

Navigation

For the most part, navigation will look fairly familiar to the system that is in place today. However we will be making a few changes during July and August as new Unified Platform sites go live. The big difference here is that content and URL structure is no longer dependent on navigation structure. So it will be easy to update and refine the navigation on an ongoing basis.

Pages

The Communications Department has ported more than 400 pages from the old site across to the Unified Platform. Thanks to all the Departments who were able to update your content before the porting occurred! If you haven’t had the opportunity to review your content, no problem. We’ll get you set up in the Unified Platform where updating content is easy. In the coming weeks, the Communications Department will continue the process of reviewing content and helping to make it more user friendly.

Places

Places exist in Unified Platform as their own unique content type. When created, they become available as a venue when you are creating an Event. The Communications Department has ported over all place information from the old site.

Document Library

The Document Library was originally developed during the Inside Sandy Springs project, but we held off populating it until the Document Working Group could weigh in on how it should be structured. It allows public and internal documents to be managed and distributed from a single source. A number of modifications have been made during SandySpringsGA.gov development (particularly in the area of filtering) and they will be ported back to Inside Sandy Springs. The library will go live internally in July and to the public shortly thereafter. We also built a document repository for documents with a limited life-span so they won’t clutter up the Document Library. We’ll be sharing more information about the Document Library in the future.

On the Unified Platform side, we’ve also been building tools to make it easier to insert documents, images and videos into your content.

External Services

Over the past couple of years we have migrated certain functions to third party services due to limitations of the old website. The following are some of the third-party services that will remain in effect:

Public Meetings: CivicClerk

At this point all public meetings are now managed on the CivicClerk platform. Please note, that historical meeting documents are in the process of being transferred to CivicClerk. The objective is to have all documents hosted in the same place to make finding information on public meetings less confusing. There will be a period of time where old public meeting documents are not available online, however, they will still be available through the City Clerk’s Office.

Recruitment

For a while now, HR has been posting open positions and accepting applications through the ADP recruitment portal. They will no longer be duplicating open positions on the City’s website. Instead the City’s website will be updated to become more of a recruitment brochure to help attract talent to the City. We are investigating the possibility of an ADP/Unified Platform integration to bring open position data back into the website in an automated fashion.

Procurements

Our Purchasing team posts open procurements and manages vendor bids on the City’s Bonfire portal. On launch, we will link out to this system, but we will likely develop an integration in the coming weeks to list open procurements.

Zoning Cases

Planning and Zoning, GIS, IT and Communications collaborated on a new zoning cases and public comment tool which went live at the beginning of the year. We will continue linking out to this tool.

Zoho Forms

The City has been using Zoho Forms for new webforms for a couple of years now. Communications is currently porting all Vision forms over to Zoho Forms. Zoho forms are much more powerful than Vision forms which allows us to improve the user experience. Zoho Forms integrates with the scripting service, Zapier, which has enabled the Communications Department to pass captured data to Asana.

Issues to Be Aware Of

The good news is that all URLs will be shortened and easy to share over the phone. But this will mean that any pages you have bookmarked will no longer link up. You’ll need to update your bookmarks. The public will be affected in the same way. The vast majority of people access City webpages via a search engine. As the new site goes live we will be submitting requests to major search engines to reindex the site. For a short period of time, search engines may still link to old URLs. In this case, the user will land on a page that will inform them why, suggest they use the site navigation or search to find the page they were looking for, and if they are still experiencing issues, to call the Call Center.

Reporting Issues

If you see any issues with the new website, report them here: spr.gs/website2021

Updating Content

Use the form at spr.gs/website2021 to request access to the Sandy Springs Unified Platform. It’s easy to use! If you need support, reach out to Marla Shavin or Jason Green.

Unified Platform Training

We are planning to schedule an upcoming Lunch and Learn where we will review content development for the new site. Ideally, it would be helpful to have at least two people from each department participate in the training. Keep an eye on Inside Sandy Springs for more information. We will be publishing some Unified Platform content creator guides on Inside Sandy Springs in the next few days.