Community Information Network

The City of St. Louis is preparing to launch a new website, replacing the one currently located at http://stlouis.missouri.org. This new site is designed to make finding information easier, and to encourage more frequent and timely updates.

Departments Have Direct Control of Content

In the past, departments had to send most updates and new content to the web team, who would then manually write code to put it on the site. Now, departments have direct control of their own content, and over 90 contributors have been assigned to make updates.

This removes the update bottleneck and puts content in the hands of the folks who know it best.

Finding Information

All content on the new site is tagged by topic, audience, department, ward, neighborhood, and content type, allowing us to pull in related content from all over the site. Reusing content in this way allows us to keep content fresh, and cuts down on duplicate data.

Not everyone who comes to our site looking for something knows exactly where to find it. To assist these people, we have set up areas where they can browse by topic or audience. The site's search is powered by a Google server, which is constantly crawling the site to update search results.

What Comes Next

A website this large is never totally finished. The web team will be monitoring things like analytics, common search terms, types of content, and feedback. This information will help us tweak the site to make finding information even easier.