The City of Westminster has gone through major growth in recent years and its Economic Development website needed to keep up. With new developments happening throughout the city, Westminster needed a website to attract both tenants and visitors. With the help of visionary internal leadership and numerous stakeholders, AOR was given the challenge of creating a website that met the needs of varying audiences.
AOR recommended a progressive phased approach to the website redesign and development. At every step in the process, AOR collaborated with the City of Westminster, Economic Development team, and the many key stakeholders to balance the needs of each group and ensure strategic goals were being met.
The first challenge to tackle was content mapping. AOR worked to restructure the site and content map to provide the numerous and varied audiences with what they needed and consolidated pages for a sound and strategic site taxonomy.
Our team started by performing and analyzing initial research, followed by a comprehensive discovery session with key members of the Westminster team. The discovery session allowed us to truly understand past website pain points, goals of the new site, target audience demographic and psychographic information, SEO and Google Analytics baseline metrics, as well as other elements that would inform all decisions moving forward in the process.
Next, AOR worked on updating the sitemap and page structure to ensure intuitive information architecture and user flow. We then began developing wireframes to outline the hierarchy of key pages and to work through functionality throughout the website.
Our website design process started with “style tiles”–a visual representation of the various design elements that would be used throughout the site. Leveraging the recently updated City of Westminster brand, three different style tiles were presented. Once approved, we used the style tile, sitemap, and wireframes as our guide, applying the selected design direction to each page throughout the site.
The new site gives the Westminster Economic Development team an updated and on-brand way to interface with and invite visitors, potential new employers, and current residents alike.
