For the past several months, visitors to the City of Hattiesburg’s website – www.hattiesburgms.com- have been greeted with a temporary interface while officials work to create an easier, more user-friendly experience for Internet users.
That process, which is being overseen by Samantha McCain, the city’s chief communications officer, is nearly complete, as McCain hopes to have the re-designed site up and running in the next couple of weeks.
“It was identified as a goal for 2018, for us to create a more robust website that has interactive features like a community calendar, up-to-date news, trash schedule – just the basic forms and information that residents are looking for when they come to our website,” she said.
The process began earlier this year, when city officials formed a focus group of about 13 participants to garner their feedback on the website, including what they were looking for, what they had trouble finding and other obstacles they had while surfing the site. Of those issues, navigation was on the top of the list of needed improvements.
“When we look at best practices across municipalities in general, some cities do it really well and some kind of miss the mark, in being more city-focused and not citizen-focused,” McCain said. “While the website had a lot of good information, it just wasn’t organized in a way that was easy to find.
“(That focus group) kind of gave us the data we really needed, and it validated what we already felt,” McCain said. “So since that time, we have been really crawling through about 500-plus pages of content that have to be restructured to be more user-friendly.”
Some members of the focus group also raised concerns about the use of stock photos – rather than photos from real events in the city – as well as difficulties searching for job postings and access to the city’s social media accounts.
“It just wasn’t easy to find that information; you kind of had to dig for it a good bit,” McCain said. “So we’re trying right now to find the balance between the information folks really need, versus just all of it.
“So it will continue to be a work in progress. I don’t think you’re ever done with a website – in order to make it what it needs to be, we’ll constantly be adding and looking at different ways to make sure that people can find the information they’re looking for.”
