Website | St. Louis County 

Introduction

I was tasked to fix signifcant broken areas of St. Louis County's website.  The site is traffic heavy, with 25,000 daily visitors.  It was a critical tool offering a depth of information specific to hundreds of categories including property taxes, public health, police, transportation, elections and County government.  The problem was the layout, design and ability to locate the information one needed was an exercise in futility.
    
Approach

Begin with research and capture the true pain points and buuild my problem stattement.  An SEO crawl identifed what I expected.  Thousands of internal problems that impacted the user experience across the entire website.  It was not intuitive and simple to navigate around.  It severely lacked a unique brand identity.  Imagery and incongraphy did not reflect the diversity of the one million people who live in St. Lous County.  My research findings validated these problems and a poor user experience.    

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Strategy

I began with a complete SEO sitemap analysis.  The site had 20,000 broken links, 5% of pages had a meta description, 83% had duplicate title tags, hundreds of outdated pages were indexing in Google crawls, thousands of alt tags were missing, no-follow rules were assigned to the wrong pages, dozens of links on the site map went to a 404 error page, and SERP was a disaster.    

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Support & Governance

Continual communication with department stateholders was key along with the support of the County Council and the County Executive.  I created new governance and change control processes.  I established new brand guidelines that focused on typography, iconography, collor pallette, copy, brand, imagery and message tone.  Feedback loops with stakeholders continued through the entire process.

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Research Results

Within one year the SEO changes were complete along with an accurate sitemap.  Googe crawls prodcued high-quality SERP pages.  I led usability sessions and contextual inquires with internal employees and daily users.  Surveys validated the impact of my work.  A better user experience emerged, setting the stage for a migration to a new content management system.