The Department of Design and Construction Website
This project entailed the overhaul of a government agency website in less than five months. Our team consisted of only myself, another writer and a designer. Looking back, I can hardly believe we met our deadline.
The current website for the Department of Design and Construction.
In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio took office and initiated change across New York City’s government agencies. The Mayor appointed a new Commissioner for the Department of Design and Construction (DDC), and I was soon tasked with leading my team in migrating the agency's website to a new instance of TeamSite with an updated front-end design.
DDC manages the design and construction of all public buildings and infrastructure in New York City. The agency’s website must serve many different people; a website visitor might be a resident who’s wondering why their water was shut off. It might also be the owner of a small construction business searching for contracts and forms. We identified our potential website visitors as constituents, government officials, journalists, business owners, architects and designers, DDC staff, and job seekers. My team discussed these potential visitors and mapped how a new website could meet their needs.
We didn’t have to start from square one. New templates for the New York City's agency websites were developed by Huge during the final year of Mayor Bloomberg's term. Our first decision was whether to use this template or develop the site from scratch. We opted to use the template—it was time-efficient, low cost, and fell in line with the City’s overall digital footprint.
In our research phase, we looked at a sampling of equivalences—websites of other government agencies around the world whose work parallels DDC’s.
Chicago: Public Buildings Commission
Houston: Department of Public Works & Engineering
Los Angeles: Department of Public Works
Seoul: Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transportation
Tokyo: Bureau of Urban Development
We reviewed how these cities delivered information on key issues that are important to New York City’s government: community services, client services, economic development, inclusiveness, resilience, responsiveness, urgency, and sustainability. This research gave us an idea of where DDC stands on an international plane, and informed how we could improve our information delivery. The research was later incorporated into a communication strategy delivered to our Commissioner.
I performed a full content audit of our old site and assigned each page an OUCH status (out-of-date, unnecessary, current, have to write). I also organized stakeholder interviews with leaders of each division in our agency to understand their digital needs. These needs were radically different. Our legal team wanted the ability to post all contract documents online (something we addressed separately), whereas our Community Initiatives division wanted a blog to showcase their stories. In total, we assessed the needs of nine divisions.
We hit upon the tagline of "Building for you." The DDC staff, which represents over 60 countries, helped us with translation. See the full video here.