2020 Launch of our updated website

On June 25, 2020, we launched the new City of Minneapolis website. It was an unsettled time: the country was in the middle of a pandemic, and Minneapolis was reeling from the murder of George Floyd.

Moving forward

The City Enterprise Web Team is dedicated to helping Minneapolis move forward. We'll continue to improve the quality of the City website. We look forward to serving you.

Focus on people's needs

To turn our vision into reality, we worked diligently with City departments to transform their content. We also asked people who use the current website every day for their input.

Based on this feedback, we designed and organized the site to:

• Help people find the critical and day-to-day information they seek.
• Meet the needs of residents, business owners and visitors.

We talked to you for our research

What we needed to know

To reach our goals, the Enterprise Web Team needed to understand:

• Who our residents, business owners and visitors are
• What they're looking for
• What tasks they want to do

To find our answers, we talked to residents, business owners and visitors to the city.

What our research included

Our outreach with residents, business owners and visitors included:

• Interviews with residents and business owners
• Conversations with seniors
• Design reviews with people who have accessibility issues
• User testing of our website
• Developing personas of people who use our website

We also analyzed

• Current site data, including the most visited pages
• Comparable sites
• Website industry standards and best practices
• Human-centered design

How we've improved our website

When you browse our site, you'll soon see that we've done more than just redesign our pages.

To transform our website, the City needed to:

Improve the look and feel

Our site has:

• More visuals
• A cleaner design
• Content that looks great on mobile devices

Reorganize the content by topic area

We used to order content by departments. Now, people can find the information they need with greater ease.

Rewrite the copy

We rewrite our content to make it clear to understand the first time you read or hear it.

With these revisions, you can:

• Scan the content.
• Understand the content.
• Quickly access City services.

Improve accessibility

The site is inclusive, and we have removed barriers to using it.

Improve search

We've included more pull-down options for easier access to content.

Put a robust web publishing system in place

Our web publishing system helps us improve the user experience and meet our goals.

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.