City of Woodstock looking to the public for ideas on a new website

Lee Griffi, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

There are only a few days left to do so, but the city wants to hear from residents on what they’d like to see in a new website. An online survey closes on Wednesday, Oct. 1.

Woodstock is in the process of migrating a website to a new platform due to the discontinuation of its existing content management system. As part of the transition, content is being updated to make it easier to find information about the programs and services. The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete.

“The purpose of the City’s website is to share information with the public and help them access programs and services offered by the city,” explained Colleen Collins, the city’s manager of marketing and communications. “While we can gather some information from analytics about what people are looking for, we want to give people a chance to tell us what’s working, what’s not and what is important to them in their city’s website.”

When any organization is doing a website refresh, navigation is always one of the top priorities. Collins said the city’s revamp is no different.

“It can be challenging to navigate any municipal website because of the number and variety of programs and services delivered to the public. We know this can make it difficult for people to find what they are looking for. It’s also been a while since the website had a comprehensive update so what might have worked when this site was new, has evolved over time and is no longer functional.”

Woodstock’s goal is to create a better user experience for those who are using its website. Collins explained they want to make the content people are looking for easier to find with fewer clicks.

“We want people to be able to accomplish what they came to our site to do – whether that’s registering for a program or finding out what’s happening at the next council meeting. The workplan includes improving our menu structure, streamlining our pages, simplifying content and addressing accessibility issues.

A budget of just over $50,000 has been allocated for the project but it isn’t limited to the city site only.

“It includes our main city website, our economic development site and two new microsites for the Museum and Woodstock Art Gallery,” she explained. “Because those three departments have specific audiences that are not always the same as what many of our users are looking for on the main site, pulling their content into connected but still distinct microsites improve user experience and potentially allows for some different functionality that is unique to their services.”

The website migration project is needed because the current content management system is being discontinued by the vendor next June. The project also includes the hiring of a temporary staff person for the eight months it will take to complete it.

“This is so we can continue to deliver our core marketing and communications services bringing to the total cost of the project to $120,990.40,” explained Collins, who described it as a massive undertaking. “We have more than 700 pages and hundreds of documents on the website. While we’ve been chipping away at different sections, re-writing content with a more user focus, some improvements made more sense to do as part of the migration. Our goal is to launch the new site late March 2026.”

The survey is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RSHHQXR.