Making Local Government Accessible
Village of Oak Park
The Challenge
Although rich in content about community services, government, events, historical points, and even tourist attractions, the Village of Oak Park’s website was functional, but dated in its look, inelegant in its navigation, and difficult to maintain.
Tasked with the redesign, Breakthrough Technologies delivered a good-looking, contemporary site, boasting easy navigation through a concise menuing system, an easily administered open-source Drupal Content Management System, and site pages that automatically translate into a variety of languages to better serve this village’s highly diverse community.
The Solution
Serving as an entry point to myriad municipal services, the Village of Oak Park website offers residents opportunities to apply for parking permits, renew licenses, report street and graffiti problems, check contractors’ licenses and zoning elements, process building permits, and more. Presenting abundant information more clearly and intuitively was BT's primary task.
“Working with Oak Park we explored their impressive reservoir of content, and figured out a really smart way to expose it without overloading the website’s entry points,” says Luke Anderson, BT Director of Content Platforms.
BT delivered a handsome, contemporary, intuitive website, optimized for tablets, that presents the village’s deep, functional resources in a more accessible package. In addition, by implementing an open-source Drupal Content Management System, website administrators can operate the site more easily and add new features and content on their own.
The site also incorporates Google Translate, a free service that provides instant translations of words, sentences and Web pages in dozens of different languages – an ideal application to better serve Oak Park’s diverse population.
The next step? The village intends to implement an even more responsive website design to optimize viewing and interactions on smart phones and other mobile devices.