City of Durham Website Updates

The City of Durham is working to improve this website to make it easier for residents to find information and complete tasks.

Updates

On July 24, the City launched the updated site with a cleaner design, simplified top navigation, and the use of icons to highlight popular information throughout the site. Learn more in the press release.

Changes were made based on community and staff feedback, which identified the following priority areas for improvement:

  • Move to a clean, updated design.
  • Make it easy to find top tasks including: pay water bill, apply for jobs, contact Durham One Call, and find trash collection schedule.
  • Review top pages to make sure content is organized and easy to understand.
  • Remove old information and documents.

City staff across all departments worked to make improvements to their top visited pages, and the content clean up will continue as we work to review additional pages and documents.

The site continues to live on the DurhamNC.gov domain and most bookmarks should continue to work, although some pages have been moved or removed in the clean up process. If you have any trouble finding what you need, send your feedback using our website feedback form and we will help you get to the information.

What Changed?

The following PDF links highlight some of the changes on the updated site.

department homepage mockup Opens in new window

Give Feedback

Maintaining and improving our site is an ongoing process, and we appreciate your feedback to help us make the site more useful. 

Site Tools

Process

Engagement & Research

In addition to the community survey in April 2019, we’ve worked with Code for Durham to get ongoing feedback and insight from Durham’s tech community, including:

  • Setting up event tracking on our website menu
  • Researching navigation on other government websites
  • Card sorting activity to test the language and terminology on the website
  • User testing conducted by UNC-Chapel Hill graduate students

In the future, we hope to provide additional opportunities for community input.

City staff and Code for Durham volunteers conduct a card sorting activity to get web input

Layout & Design

Using web analytics as well as feedback from our survey, we are working with our website vendor to rework the homepage layout and create a new, clean template across the site.

Content Clean Up

City departments are using website traffic data, heat maps, and readability scores to help prioritize and reorganize information on the website.