East Palo Alto, California, Enhances its Digital Presence with a CivicPlus® Municipal Website

East Palo Alto, California, wanted to create a new chapter in the City’s history by giving its community a brand new website. Before partnering with CivicPlus­^® (formerly Municode), the City’s old website lacked many modern features and standards needed to support resident self-service capabilities. For example, the content did not extend to each page’s edges, making everything feel cluttered and small. In addition, East Palo Alto’s homepage needed more content to aid its residents in finding information quickly. It was also important to staff that the website’s content management system (CMS) was easy to use as the number of web pages would greatly increase.

East Palo Alto ultimately with CivicPlus (formerly Muicode), its long-time Codification and Online Code Hosting partner for its website redesign. This extended partnership worked to the City’s advantage as both its online code of ordinances and website now benefit from single search capabilities.

When entering the home page, users are greeted with full-page and warm colors matching the sunset on the city’s seal. From here, residents have the option of finding content through the top mega menu, using the search bar, or clicking on the quick links based on the historical data regarding the website’s most visited pages. Scrolling reveals the City’s calendar, news and announcements, and its social media pages.

To streamline communications between the public and staff as well as increase transparency, the City added several new pages. Citizen 311 makes it easier for the public to submit tickets as well as find contact information for staff and departments. The new parks page gives the community information on Palo Alto’s beautiful parks, and the projects page allows residents to look at a fully transparent list of upcoming community projects. Today, all new content is easily added to the website by staff using the intuitive content management system, requiring little or no staff training.