We re-launched the Franklin County, Ohio website using an all-new approach

franklincountyohio.gov is now service-focused, not agency-focused

This past week our GX Concourse team re-launched the “core” website for Franklin County, Ohio at franklincountyohio.gov. The new site isn’t just a new visual design. It has a new technical back-end, using the OpenCities platform provided by Granicus, and it’s a complete re-thinking of government websites for our county.

This site is not our “final” site, which will gather services from across Franklin County under one roof. It’s more of a “links” site today, which will send you out to the various websites each of our agencies already have. We’re getting our feet wet with this platform and working on yet another re-launch site to debut in 2025.

The big difference between the old site and the new is the way the site is organized.

This post will go much more into depth than our simple LinkedIn announcement. So read on if you’d like the deep-dive.

Designed for citizens, not agencies

The prior design was setup around the names of the various agencies, using their terminology and organized structurally as the county itself is organized. And that makes precisely zero sense to the public, who do not know local government jargon and just want to get stuff done with us, not learn our lingo, structures, or elected officials’ names. This new site is setup around services, using language that is accessible to the general public.

For example, did you know that if you want to license your dog, you have to go to the… Auditor’s website? Yes, we have an Animal Control agency, but they don’t do dog licensing, because… reasons. Does that make sense? Another example… did you know marriage licenses come from the Probate Court, and not from the “General Division” of our courts?

• Question: Why should the public have to know these things?

• Answer: They don’t—if we design digital services for them and not ourselves.

So this new site is the beginning of an overhaul that will plow under more than 40 independent agency websites over the next couple years, bringing all county-based services under one digital roof, and representing those services in ways that will make a ton more sense to the residents and businesses our agencies serve every day.

Highlights from the new site

While this is not a tour-de-force website redesign (we’re using the standard Granicus design with very little additional flair), there are nevertheless a bunch of functional and technical improvements, including:

• As noted earlier, we now offer Service-focused functionality using common language (rather than expecting users to know agency names or county structures)

• Integrated language translation options

• ADA accessibility features

• Vastly improved Search functionality, plus a consistent site design

• Quick Links to the most popular services

• Feedback options available on every page, plus a new Contact Us option (the prior site offered no feedback or contact features)

• Google Maps integration for finding services in the real world

The old site? Yikes.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

About our process (a rough timeline of 9 months)

Getting to this 1.0 launch has been challenging. We had to hit several marks, including (but not limited to):

• Hire a leader to launch creation of the GX Concourse team and drive the project. We did that in May 2023. (If we hadn’t hired, this project would have stalled.)

• Negotiated and signed an agreement with Granicus for the software licensing and professional services to get the project going. The signing was in roughly August 2023, but negotiations too several months (mostly because of our federated decision-making and funding structures).

  • The agreement was setup as a multi-phase project (no surprise). But the one thing other digital teams may find interesting is that we deliberately planned to launch one Granicus-based site to replace our “core” site (now), and then we would create yet another website from the ground up that takes over for Site 1.0, replaces about 15 websites, and adds digital services and agencies.

• Gather key people from 14 agencies—all under the Commissioners’ office—that would participate in digital content development for now and the foreseeable future. This included leadership as well as hands-on folks.

  • There’s an additional 30+ agencies beyond those 14. We’ve been sharing info with them, but have not directly engaged. Yet. That comes next.

• Create a digital communications support group called Voice of the County (VoCo) and invite all our content-focused people into it for sharing info, ideas, and discussion. Also create a monthly meeting for info sharing.

• With Granicus’ direct leadership, complete some “light” user research and discovery combining legacy site traffic data, limited surveys, and some in-depth qualitative interview sessions with agencies and (where possible) members of the public. This fed design decisions about the new 1.0 site. (Dec 2023 - Feb 2023)

• Granicus engineers built the new site atop their cloud-hosted solution, copying / recreating content from our source site. (Mar 2024)

• Our team got training on the new tools (Mar-Apr 2024)

• Our team designed the information model for the “services finder” (this is the tool on the home page that starts “I WANT…” and leads users through various thematic and specific options. (Mar-Apr 2024)

• We set a launch date, edited content, tested a beta site, edited more content, tested again… right up to the day before launch.

• Finally, on launch day (April 18) we made DNS changes to point at the Granicus infrastructure, re-listed the old website under a new address (in case we need it), and tested some more. The launch went pretty smooth.

Feedback on the new site started to roll in within a couple hours, which was a surprise.

About the team

This was a team effort, to be sure, but the bulk of the hands-on work was done by two people:

• Sarah Gray, GX Concourse Manager. Sarah brought CX experience to the table, not to mention a level of emotional intelligence and care for our agencies that few possess, even in an organization setup to serve the needs of agencies. She coordinated the entire effort and worked on it, too. And she only joined the GX Foundry in May 2023.

• Caitlyn Coughlin, GX Product Owner. Caitlyn worked on a website refresh effort in our county courts and brings attention to detail and direct experience with providing tech support to end users tackling complex software tools. She joined us in September 2023.

Of course there’s a cast of characters around this project aside from Sarah and Caitlyn, including:

• John Proffitt, Chief Digital Officer @ FCDC

• Adam Frumkin, CIO, FCDC

• Juan Torres, CIO, Commissioners office

• Joe Curtiss-Lusher and Petra Adams (and lots more folks) - Project and Technical leads from Granicus

• Lots of folks working in the 14 “launch” agencies under the Comissioners’ umbrella, including Public Information Officers and general staff of all kinds with website / digital content responsibilities

What’s next: Keep the 1.0 site alive, build the 2.0 site from the ground up

1. We’ll maintain this new 1.0 site and make minor improvements along the way until we are ready to replace it entirely with a new core site, probably in early 2025. (It will be tough to not upgrade the site in-place, but we must stay focused on Site 2.0 or we’ll never get it done.)

2. We are in the midst of “content rationalization” now, which is basically a review of current sites to build a model for the next site’s structure and content. There’s about 900 pages to be reviewed and revamped, but we think that number will come down dramatically in the 2.0 site.

3. We are starting talks with the “post launch” agencies—those that are not included in the 2.0 launch—to start laying the groundwork for their own education, integration with the project, and then the same processes of research / discovery, content rationalization, etc.

4. We will be learning and testing the “OpenForms” product from Granicus in the next couple months, in the hopes of using it to digitize both forms and forms processing efforts alongside our agency partners. The product looks good, but the real question is whether we can convince the agencies to allow us to replicate current processes in this new digital form.

5. We expect “rationalized” content to be loaded into the 2.0 site (which, again, is separate from our 1.0 site) over the summer and fall of 2024. By the time 2025 hits, we should be on the cusp of launching the 2.0 site, which will be a much bigger deal than last week’s launch.

I guarantee we’re leaving some details out of that list. There’s a lot of meetings, trainings, and info-sharing sessions to be done along the way.

What, me worry?

Going forward, some concerns of ours:

• Staffing. We can’t keep the 1.0 site alive and build a 2.0 site while bringing the 3.0 site agencies into the conversation with only 2 people. That’s not reasonable in a county of more than 6,000 employees spread across 40+ agencies. We are also very aware agencies do not have content- or communication-specific people on staff to do this work, but even if they do, they’re already busy. We need to support our agencies not only with design/research or engineering help, but raw content development help. We’re making a pitch now for more staff ASAP and then more in 2025 as well.

• Hold-outs. Past the first 14 agencies in the 1.0 and 2.0 launches, we may have some that don’t like the idea of moving to a centralized service-focused platform and shutting down their independent websites. That takes away the “me, me, me” factor, and some folks may not want to play ball. Given we have a federated county structure (diffused decision-making across a variety of independently-elected officials), at best we can encourage and directly support a move to the new model, and actively un-support independent sites. But if an agency is adamant about steering clear of the One Franklin County project, well… all we can do is use our new site(s) to link to their site and call it a day.

• Standardizing tone. A big focus going forward with the new sites is using the most basic, plain language we can get away with, to meet the public where they are and also enable cleaner auto-translations to other languages. But there will be lots and lots of people that have access to editing site content, not all of whom are really writers. So how do you standardize the writing style and tone across a sprawling multi-editor site? Well, there are some tools to help, and we can make them available, but at the end of the day it may turn into a big editing job for us.

Stay tuned

This 1.0 site launch is literally just the beginning. Technically it’s not a super-impressive site. But the behind-the-scenes cat-herding by our team has been amazing. There are probably 100 people involved in this project somewhere between one tiny degree or a huge, career-defining degree. So wrangling all those people, their interests, and their participation has required a lot of “emotional labor” and administrative work for the GX Concourse team.

But with the first hurdle passed, hopefully we can really take off.