The last week in September marked the first week of the City of Greenville’s new website – greenvillenc.gov. After several months of planning and technical work, the City launched its newly redesigned website.

“We heard for years that the site was cluttered and hard to navigate,” said Communications Manager Steve Hawley. “We studied at the analytics to determine what information and pages people were searching for and going to the most and tried to make it as easy to get to those pages as possible.”

The new site has a top navigation bar featuring a “megamenu” which shows many pages and services organized by departments. Then, top information is divided into Live, Work, and Play sections to make it easy to find information based on everyday life needs, business needs, and for your play time. Not all links there are for City government pages. Hawley said, “This site needs to reflect that ours is not only a high-quality organization, but a high-quality community as well. Providing a few extra links will help show people and businesses considering visiting or relocating a few of the things we have which help make Greenville a great place to find yourself in good company.”

Finally, an “I Want To…” navigation was created to help easily connect people to more of those top pages and services the City provides. “The whole site was designed around ease of use for both the page visitor and for staff,” said Hawley. “From the reorganized pages and links to the custom buttons on each department’s pages, we wanted to make it easier for people to use and find the things they wanted.

“Greenvillenc.gov was even created with responsive design. That means if you resize the window in which you’re seeing the site, the page will automatically resize and shift information around to make it easy to use. That’s key for people visiting the site on mobile devices, like smartphones. This site is now very easy for mobile users to use.”

The overall look of the site features bright and vibrant colors, vivid pictures, and a clean layout that all match the City’s brand, complete with the new logo. Many of the online tools have been enhanced to work better with the site with more optimization to follow in the coming months. Social media sites are even featured on the site.

Greenville worked with award-winning Vision Internet, a leader and innovator of municipal websites, to develop the site and will use VisionLive content management system. “VisionLive gives us a state-of-the-art content management system that is updated monthly with enhancements,” said Hawley. “It also gives us access to Vision’s team of designers and engineers to solve any issues we may have moving forward.”

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