- Success Story
- Morrisville, NC
How Morrisville, NC Consulted with Granicus Experience Group to Refresh Its Website While Saving on Resources and Improving the User Experience
Overview
A government’s website is one of its most public-facing tools and an integral way to reach and inform a city’s residents. Morrisville, North Carolina, a growing Raleigh suburb located just south of the area’s thriving Research Triangle Park, recognized the need to improve its website’s functionality to continue to serve its tech savvy community. Morrisville leadership evaluated the current state of their website, considered their resources, and determined the best path for the site moving forward was not necessarily a new site, but a refresh of their existing one.
Metrics
- Improved customer experience
- More accurate, complete search results
- Established formal internal web processes
- Standardized look and feel for top 20 most visited pages
Improving Search Functionality and Customer Experience
One of the first issues the Morrisville government wanted to address was improving their website’s search function. The communications team had heard comments from internal and external parties about pages returning inaccurate or incomplete search results. Additionally, important keywords were missing from some pages which was hindering the search results. Upon researching these issues and potential solutions, Morrisville leadership engaged with the Granicus Experience Group (GXG) team to improve the site’s performance.
Taking Strategic Steps to Enhance the Customer Experience
GXG helped Morrisville leaders maximize the value of their existing site by determining their goals and how they wanted to improve the overall customer experience. The Morrisville communications team took a three-step approach to resolve the search function issue on the website. The first step was removing some documents that were not being used, but which were clogging up the site and the search capability. The next step, done in conjunction with removing unnecessary documents, was updating and adding keywords to active pages on the site to boost search engine optimization. Finally, the team engaged with GXG to help reformat the top 20 most visited pages on the website.
Flexible Digital Solutions, Best Practices Boost Search Results
GXG provided the team with helpful options, strong guidance, and training documents and tutorials that were able to be shared with internal web editors. By using GXG to refresh their site, the Morrisville team introduced key internal processes to bridge the communications gap created when team members leave or join. They also incorporated best practices into the site, such as removing the FAQs section and adding more buttons where appropriate, which helped boost the efficacy of pages. Additionally, the internal web team attained the appropriate permissions to make the necessary changes and procedural blocks were eliminated.
Morrisville leaders plan to distribute a survey to gather users’ opinions about the changes to the website. In the meantime, they have received anecdotal positive feedback about the changes they have made to the website. People like the reformatted pages and users are receiving more accurate, complete results when keywords are used. Moving forward, the Morrisville communications team plans to use the flexible, repeatable processes from GXG to reformat and standardize the next level pages to keep a consistent look and feel across the site.