Our website approach
Website background and history
Our content approach
Start with content strategy
We developed our content strategy early on
We want to help all website visitors access the information and services they need to live, work and play in Minneapolis.
We do this by creating clear, consistent content.
Content principles we follow
After we developed our strategy, we created our principles:
- Be consistent.
- Be concise, simple and clear.
- Write for the web.
- Communicate with empathy and purpose.
- Build for accessibility and inclusion.
- Be human-centered and data-driven.
- Have one place for each piece of content.
- Tell our story.
What these principles do
These principles:
- Guide us as we write, edit and retire content
- Serve as an experienced team member, providing guidance for all our content work
Design for a great city
The new website represents the city we aspire to be:
- Actively engaged
- Vibrant
- Inclusive
- Welcoming
- Modern
We make our content
- Relevant and timely.
- Scannable.
- Findable.
- Grab-and-go.
- Quickly understood.
- One source of truth.
- One city, one voice.
These phrases became the team’s mantra. We use them when sharing our story and working with departments to transform their content.
Roles
Know the roles and responsibilities of the City employees who oversee, update and maintain the website content.
Digital Services Team
| Roles | Responsibilities |
|---|---|
| Information Technology with the Enterprise Web Team | Leadership from many departments in the City offer guidance to all web users. |
| Communications department | Communications maintains and governs events, news, social media. They also maintain the City homepage and site-wide alerts on our website. |
| Neighborhood & Community Relations department |
NCR provides accessibility and language services for the public and City. |
City Department web roles
| Roles | Responsibilities |
|---|---|
| Quality Owners | Quality Owners are responsible for content in their area. They assist web contributors and approve their content. |
| Content Editors | Content Editors make website updates. They maintain the quality and accuracy of their department's web content. |
|
Subject Matter Experts (No web editing duties) |
Subject Matter Experts know the most about the topics. They request updates from their department web team, but do not update the City website. |
Content organization
Content sorted by topic
People come to the City’s public website to find information or complete a task. We reorganized our content by topic. This helps people get to the content they want with ease.
Our main topics
- Resident services
- Business services
- Things to do
- Getting around
- Government
Web design and features
We website allow people to access our content quickly and consistently. Here are some ways we help to keep our content consistent, organized and easy-to-scan.
Design features we use
- “I want to” tiles for quick access to tasks people want to complete.
- 311 help button that appears on every page of the website — help is one click away.
- Report an issue pages that are accessible from a topic area, from search and from a central listing.
- “Before you begin” directions that explain what you need to know before completing a form or viewing a PDF.
- City data and maps that display content visually so users can scan and interact with it.
- City official and department contact information so people can connect with our City government.
We continue to improve our web content
With the initial website launch, the Enterprise Web team realizes that we have not reached all our ambitious goals. We'll continue to fine-tune our work while being true to our content strategy, principles and goals.
We know that our work never ends. We have an ongoing responsibility to deliver a great website experience to everyone who lives, works and plays in Minneapolis.
The City Enterprise Web Team continues to:
- Organize content in a way that makes it easy to find.
- Create content that’s easier to read and scan.
- Write inclusively, with the diversity of our residents in mind.
- Improve the accessibility of our content.
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