The City of Arlington’s website, www.arlingtontx.gov, has more than just a new look. This redesigned site offers several new features that aim to enhance customer service, user experience and provide our citizens with a better understanding of city services and programs, investments and life here in The American Dream City.

We’ve spent the past 15 months working with CivicLive, a website company with extensive history in building municipal websites, to develop a fresh, more responsive site that meets your needs and expectations, whether you are a new or long-time resident, a business owner, a contractor or a visitor. You’ll still be able to do the things that are important to you, such as pay your water bill, apply for a permit, search for adoptable pets or connect with vital city services. But we hope you’ll also take this opportunity to explore our site and find new ways to become more involved in the community, whether that is through volunteering, signing up for a parks or library program, or participating in our Kindness Initiative.

“The City’s top priority for the new website was to make sure it was developed from the user’s perspective, offering a more user-friendly experience that provides a greater degree of transparency for our residents,” said Jay Warren, director of Communication and Legislative Affairs. “The new site makes it easier to find services that are important to our residents, with an emphasis on providing local Arlington news, original content and information.”

User behavior data was a big driver in Arlington’s website redesign. 

“Our website design is not based on what City staff thought our residents wanted. Our site’s navigation, tools and design features are based on Google analytics that objectively capture our visitors’ behavior, including the pages they visit the most and the information they search for the most,” Warren said.

Improvements include:

• Mobile compatibility to provide the same service and high-quality experience that those who are on a tablet and smartphone would find while using a computer.
• More emphasis on local news. Visitors to our home page can easily find news and feature articles, videos and the City’s social media feeds to stay informed and learn more about The American Dream City.  
• A “Your City at Work” dashboard, which prominently displays real-time data on city programs and service performance measures on everything from police and fire response times to how much residential recycling is collected each month. This animated data displayed on the dashboard changes based on which departmental webpage you are visiting. 
• An easy-to-find search bar and enhanced website search capabilities through Google search integration. 
• A new voice search option available to visitors who click the microphone icon in the search bar. 
• Web accessibility functions designed to meet guidelines established by the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Web Content Accessibilities Guidelines. These improvements include being able to navigate through the website and online forms by keyboard as much as possible versus using a mouse, limiting colors that may be hard to distinguish by those who are colorblind, and adding descriptive text tags to images and allowing text to be easily enlarged for visitors who use assistive technology such as screen readers or text magnifiers. Click here to learn more about our accessibility design guidelines.

The City also tapped visitor analytics to identify and remove hundreds of departmental pages that were not frequently visited or were no longer relevant to help create a more streamlined website for users. 

“We’re so proud of Arlington’s breathtaking new website, from the mobile-friendly flyover of the city to the locally-focused newsroom, it all comes together beautifully,” said Nate Brogan, division president, West/CivicLive. “Working with Arlington, they continually challenged us to push boundaries beyond the traditional municipal website, culminating in an ultra-modern visitor-friendly site that truly serves their community.”