City of Danbury

City of Danbury

Client: Lumi Agency | City of Danbury
Date: July 19, 2017
Services: User Experience, Website

Info

A Unified Experience for Danbury

I was born and raised in Danbury, CT. So when Lumi Agency contacted me about redesigning the website for the City of Danbury, it was an obvious choice. I took a look at the existing website and it was easy to see why it was time for a refresh — the site was outdated with tons of duplicated content spread across 300 pages. The user experience was frustrating and the site architecture was disjointed. All of the challenges that come with experiencing and using a government website really boils down to this — there are too many stakeholders adding content to the website and over time, it turns into an unorganized mess. It was time for a change for the City of Danbury.

Launch Website

The Process (of Elimination)

“We went from 300 pages down to 120 pages, so we cleaned it up,” Mayor Mark Boughton said.

The City of Danbury’s original website had many duplicated areas of content, in addition to broken links. The site needed to be better organized with a scalable framework to prevent this clutter from happening in the future. After completing a full audit of the site’s pages and content, I created a new site map and condensed 300+ pages down to 120. While wireframing, I created 16 unique templates to accommodate all of the content within the website—assigning every single page to a template to avoid any gaps when it came to transferring all the content over to the new platform.

Hover states, click states, transitions and layout hierarchy— now this is where the project gets interesting. When it came to design, a simple orange and blue color palette was chosen to match the city’s biggest high school (DHS). With a massive navigation and loads of unique content, the design structure of the website had to effortlessly accommodate it all, in addition with room to grow throughout the years. To keep the site engaging and reduce content clutter, large photography plays a key role on each page.

View Wireframes

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