City of Ogden

Summary

The city of Ogden, located in northern Utah, has gained international recognition as a high adventure destination thriving with economic resurgence. Ogden City’s website, however, reflected none of that exciting image. The city’s site needed to showcase the high adventure recreation and eclectic local vibe that Ogden has to offer. Along with a complete design makeover, Ogden City’s website needed to seamlessly integrate with several other software and database solutions. The site needed to be user friendly enough to cater to varied audiences while being complex enough to serve the myriad of needs of city government’s many different functions. Using Sitecore for their Content Management System (CMS), Ogden City has been able to revitalize their website, more efficiently manage their data, and portray an image that helped earn Ogden the distinction of being named “one of the best place(s) to do business, the best economy, (and) the hippest city in America” by New York Times, February 15, 2009.

“The Mayor is really pleased with the new site. We’re beginning to realize the full potential of what can be done – there are so many things that we can leverage. We have all the complexity we need behind the scenes, yet Sitecore makes this transparent to our users. The site will continue to grow – in a managed and controlled manner.”

-Denise Taylor, Ogden City’s IT Development Supervisor

Challenge

Ogden is located about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City and has a population of 82,000. Ogden’s history is a tale of distinction, beginning with its start as a booming railroad town. Owing to its central location for both major east-west and north-south rail routes, Ogden was touted as The Junction of the West, and its business community bragged “you can’t go anywhere without coming to Ogden.” The town continued to grow throughout the 20^th century expanding into military and manufacturing industries, but then saw some tough economic pains in the past twenty years. However, in the winter of 2002 the world's eyes were on Ogden once again as it hosted the downhill, slalom, and giant slalom ski events as well as the ice events for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.

Ogden’s Mayor, Matthew Godfrey, initiated a major campaign shortly thereafter to revitalize the city and transform its image. Now in his third term, one of the Mayor’s key revitalization strategies was to bank on the location of Ogden as it relates to local recreation. Nestled at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, Ogden is surrounded by outdoor recreational opportunities. There are walking trails within the city, kayaking right downtown, bicycling throughout town, and an indoor recreation facility where visitors can participate in skydiving, boogie boarding, rock climbing and more. Ogden has its own municipal airport, is a hub for mass transit, and is at a cross-section of two major interstates. Economic redevelopment has brought the city back to where it looks and feels like a progressive municipality. High adventure recreation is a big part of Ogden’s economy, and Mayor Godfrey has capitalized on being able to recruit businesses that are recreation minded. In the last five years, Mayor Godfrey has played an integral role in attracting 14 major outdoor sporting goods manufacturing companies to the area.

With all of its success and progress, Mayor Godfrey still felt as though the lack-luster website may be holding Ogden back. Over the years, Ogden had changed website vendors, technologies and webmasters a few times. Each time the site grew larger and more diverse, until the almost 1,500 pages had become very difficult to manage. Duplications and outdated items were rampant throughout the site. Many pages contained the same information or variations of the same information, making updating and editing an exhausting endeavor.

In August of 2007, Ogden City’s IT Development Team took on the project of cleaning up the website. They knew it was a mess. “We found major issues with both our site and existing technologies,” says Denise Taylor, Ogden City’s IT Development Supervisor. “We had outgrown its capabilities. We had a number of other tools at our disposal that we wanted to integrate, but knew the effort required to integrate them into the existing site would be both time consuming and costly. We were also tied in very closely to our website vendor at the time, so there were many things we just couldn’t do ourselves. Ultimately we decided to replace the CMS and build a new website from scratch.”

Solution

Ogden City chose Roundedcube Inc., a Sitecore partner and website design vendor based in St. Louis, MO, to help with their website overhaul. Roundedcube hit the ground running by visiting Ogden to get a feel for the area. They met with key individuals within Ogden City to discuss the needs and unique business challenges presented by each of the city government’s divisions. Though part of one organization with one common goal, each department (i.e. police department, fire department, animal services, planning and development, public services, water utilities, etc.) operated as its own small business with its own unique message and mission to serve the community and satisfy residents, visitors, and local businesses.

Taylor says, “Roundedcube did an excellent job of understanding our Mayor’s vision and where we wanted to go technically. They helped us organize our site’s navigation by like content (as opposed to city organizational structure) so the public now has a much easier time locating information without the need to understand how city departments and divisions are organized. Overall, the site has dropped from 1,500 pages to about 250, even with mapping, calendaring, and document search capabilities added in that weren’t available before.”

Ogden City chose the Sitecore CMS because it would allow them to integrate seamlessly with several different applications to maximize their existing assets. Some of these included:

• Community Calendar: powered by Trumba, brings all local events and attractions owned by various community organizations, businesses, and event coordinators together into one fully interactive calendar.
• City Document Search Tool: powered by Worldox, allows the city to offer true transparency in government with step-by-step document searches, preselected document lists, maps, audio, video and more.
• “How Do I” FAQs: powered by WebQA, provides content-specific answers to questions, service definitions and contacts, and online request tracking.
• Google Mini Search Appliance: allows searching of the entire site, a sub-section of the site, or city news archives.
• Google Maps: directional maps provide turn-by-turn instructions to addresses throughout the city while interactive maps highlight attractions, recreation and city parks.
• Flash: offers eye-catching headlines, featured news, video players and slideshows.
• Google Analytics
•  Yahoo! Weather

“Sitecore was a great fit for this project as the flexibility of the CMS lets us design without creative limitations and seamlessly plug in many other off-the-shelf and custom applications resulting in a great user experience for the website visitors, but also for the content editors.” Aaron Branson, Vice President, Operations, Roundedcube.

Result

Ogden City’s website is now a beautiful showcase of this thriving, high adventure recreation destination. 

“I am quite pleased with our new website and the image it portrays to our residents and visitors about our city,” says Mayor Godfrey. “It captures the unique spirit of Ogden. Those who have been to Ogden know that our City is exhilarating; now those who visit our website get to catch a glimpse of that excitement, too. The images are awe insipiring, and in most cases are taken by local photographers portraying local athletes. We can now use our website to share critical information with the general public in a very efficient way; our news stories are all located front and center, and virtually every piece of critical information is readily accessible from the homepage. I’ve heard from residents who are happy with the new site and businesses who are thrilled with its functionality.”

Some improvements to the site include:

• Compelling design: Roundedcube came up with different designs, featuring color schemes and images that coordinate with the seasons and promote different outdoor recreation activities – so the site can display a new design and promotion for each season.
• Streamlined, accessible content: The City was able to go from 1,500 pages down to 250 content pages, and they also flattened the site, replacing the 7- or 8-level navigation with just three levels organized in an 8-leg content structure, making information easier to find and the site simpler to navigate. In addition, the content is fresh and consistently updated.
• Efficient site management: Previously, there were 58 active content editors and more than 100 users who had posted content at one time or another.  Now, the same site is managed entirely by only five editors. Editors post content in one place, and have it appear in multiple places. Links to documents, media, FAQs and external sites all have singular points of entry but can be referenced anywhere in the site.  Multimedia images and players, stored in Sitecore’s media library, can be referenced from page bodies or from external XMLs.  Objects are stored once and used repeatedly. 
• Interactive Maps: The city’s new site includes extensive integration with Google Maps, and site visitors can view more than 60 different area maps of local attractions, city parks, medical facilities, and more.
• Community Calendar: A significant benefit of the website is the consolidation of all of the community’s various events into one single, powerful calendaring tool.  Entities from throughout the Ogden area post events to the calendar and citizens are invited to post events as well.

Ogden City didn’t have any analytics on the old site, so they can’t compare statistics. However, in the first month since going live, they saw 23,000 unique visits to site, with more than 93,000 page views. Approximately 54 percent of the site visitors are new, and 45 percent are returning visitors.

Says Taylor, “The Mayor is really pleased with the new site. We’re beginning to realize the full potential of what can be done – there are so many things that we can leverage. We have all the complexity we need behind the scenes, yet Sitecore makes this transparent to our users. The site will continue to grow – in a managed and controlled manner.”

Moving forward, Ogden City plans to incorporate more social networking features, to get visitors interacting and involved.

Ogden City has been listed by Rock and Ice Magazine in its Top 10 Climbing Towns (Sept 2008), and included in Men’s Journal (March 2007), who said Ogden is a place where you can "Do it All, Whatever the Season". Outside Magazine (Aug 2008) called Ogden "unpretentious and adrenalized", when it listed Ogden in the top three towns of “Where to Live Now: The 20 Best Towns in America,” and the New York Times (Feb 14, 2009) stated, "Ogden, Utah, is on several lists today including the best place to do business, the best economy, and the hippest city in America."

Technical Description

The Sitecore CMS V6 is set up inside a network on a virtual server. “From a technical standpoint, we have been very pleased with Sitecore’s publishing abilities in a virtual environment. It’s great for backup and restoration, as well as for leveraging our existing hardware,” says Andy Lefgren, Ogden’s Network Administrator.

Ogden City has two external, load-balanced, mirrored servers for hosting the site.  Plans are to eventually move one server to a separate location for increased protection in the event of a disaster. “The website is critical for conveying information to citizens and one of first things we want back up in an emergency situation,” says Taylor.

Solution Special Ingredients

• Worldox, document management system
• Trumba, a community calendar application
• WebQA, citizen request and “How Do I” tool
• Adobe Flash
• Google Mini Search Appliance
• Google Maps