City of Edmonton

The Client

The City of Edmonton is known for its beautiful river valley and some sort of large shopping centre. The municipal government takes care of over a million citizens, dealing with almost every facet of their lives – recreation, plumbing, streets, pets, buses, safety and economic health, among dozens of others. Cities are limited in their revenue opportunities, however, since most taxation goes directly to regional and federal government. They always have to do more with less – especially when it comes to IT and Communications.

The Problem

The City of Edmonton’s website was “really difficult to use, and the frustrations were constant. It definitely wasn’t giving the right impression of the city,” according to Paul Strandlund, Web Operations Manager at the City of Edmonton. The site was inflexible, antiquated, and difficult to navigate. There were no systems for workflow or governance, and the IT team was spending almost all of its time babysitting servers instead of helping people.

The Solution

Yellow Pencil implemented a complete overhaul of the City’s site design, structure, delivery and governance at a pretty darn speedy pace – only seven weeks from project kickoff to site launch. The project included:

• Audit of every major municipal website in Canada to establish industry best practices
• Web writing and CMS training of 200+ content authors
• Automated content cleanup and migration, shaving weeks off our timeline
• A web “war room,” with 18 content authors, experts, and IT staff working for 12 hours a day to migrate, edit, and publish content.
• Content approval, release, and governance processes, preventing unapproved or outdated content
• Content reduced to just over 5000 pages, from over 11 000
• Overhaul of internally-focused site structure and taxonomy – site uses plain language terms and customer-focused structure
• Better integration of social and rich media, allowing for two-way communication with citizens
• Total outsourcing of web operations to Yellow Pencil on a SAAS (software-as-a-service) model

The Results

Usage of the new Edmonton.ca increased by 19% over the first year after launch. Some parts of the site saw usage increase by 30% or more.

Not only is the site more usable for visitors, it’s also more manageable for City staff. The Open Text Content Management system requires very little training for content authors, and the City’s new governance plan keeps the site a lean, clean content machine.