Overview

Santa Rosa is the county seat of Sonoma County, California, United States. The 2010 census reported a population of 167,815. Santa Rosa is the largest city in California's Wine Country and fifth largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area, after San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont and 26th largest city in California.

Challenges/Goals

The City of Santa Rosa undertook an RFP process (our original reply can be found here) with a goal to redesign their public facing website. The existing website, at that time, was a reflection of the internal structure of the city rather than customer and services oriented communication platform.

The goals for the new site were that it needed to be easy to use and provide quick access to information relevant to the end user. The new architecture also needed to reflect a sense of “What can the City of Santa Rosa do for you”, rather than the then existing site’s “defensive” tone, where the perception was that of being reactive to users.

The new website needed to engage users to create a strong sense of community wealth and ownership. It required a new content architecture and accessible interface resulting in an highly effective navigation driving a consumer and services oriented approach. Additionally, the new site needed to be W3C "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" Level "A" and ADA compliant.

Solution/Approach

The Synergy project team carried out a detailed review of the project objectives and requirements with Santa Rosa’s technical, creative and account and other department representatives from Santa Rosa, to develop a comprehensive strategic website solution capable of integrating with their external applications.

Using our proven “Wireframe” documentation process, we created a “blue print” document that was the guide for the rest of the development and testing tasks. Synergy’s development staff and the Santa Rosa project team worked closely on all project documentation deliverables (Site Map, Wire Frame/Functional Specification, Testing plans etc.).

Synergy developed all initial and unique primary, secondary, and tertiary templates, populating content for each instance in addition to developing and populating any custom templates.

Results

The website launched successfully and effectively serves the community of Santa Rosa as a tool for information and community outreach.