City of Centennial Achieves Website Excellence With Monsido

Established in 2001, the City of Centennial is a forward-thinking and innovative municipality located in the Denver metropolitan area of Colorado. One of the new city government goals was to focus on providing exceptional service to their residents, businesses, and those working in their city. Today, the city has more than 110,000 residents and proudly celebrates its 20th anniversary as one of Colorado's safest cities.

The City of Centennial’s website is managed by two communications team members, Kelly Ohaver, Customer Experience Manager, and Tobias Henderson, Communications Coordinator. When they started looking for a new website quality assurance system, the city was in the midst of switching to a new Content Management System (CMS), and beginning a website redesign. Their goals for their new website were to deliver a good user experience, enhanced search and navigation, and improve website accessibility.

A former colleague of theirs evaluated web governance solutions to replace their existing solution, which did not meet their needs around accessibility compliance. Monsido proved to be a strong contender to help them improve web accessibility, and monitor and maintain other key factors related to their website goals, such as monitoring website uptime and ensuring an error-free user experience. They decided to move forward with Monsido in January 2020.

While the communications team oversees the website, they also give other departments access to add content to the city website. With seven content contributors, this sometimes resulted in minor errors or a lack of consistency on the website.

Tobias is responsible for monitoring the weekly reports. The Centennial Communications team uses Monsido’s comprehensive reports to educate others departments on which errors are most frequent, best practices to avoid errors, and how to correct errors when they arise.

"The reports from Monsido have given me a structured way to give feedback to our content editors and create a system of accountability to keep our website error-free.", said Tobias.

As a local government body, it’s vital that their website is always up-to-date as it allows citizens to digitally access city services, such as applying for building permits (or even something more mundane - like paying a speeding ticket!). Thus, the website redesign saw a huge focus on content quality assurance. Shortly after relaunching, Centennial used Monsido to reduce quality assurance errors, such as broken links and misspellings, by nearly 80%. Since then, they have leveraged Monsido to maintain content quality in these key areas.

Along with their website redesign, the City of Centennial also had a solid focus on delivering a strong user-driven experience and ensuring users can easily find the information they are looking for. To do this, Kelly noted that they used Monsido’s SEO module to ensure that all of their pages were correctly set up and optimized, and they’ve since solved 100% of SEO opportunities.

"It’s not about big jumps in improvement for us. It’s about consistently delivering a good experience for our website visitors and making sure that we provide a user-centric website experience", said Kelly. "By using Monsido, we're able to maintain a city website of the highest quality continuously"

An added benefit for the City of Centennial is the in-tool chat support, which has helped them better use the tool on numerous occasions.

"Their support team helped us ensure that the migration from our prior vendor was successful, helping ensure we could successfully launch the redesigned website on time" said Kelly. "As we look to the future, we’re excited to use the Monsido platform to focus on making our website as accessible as possible for all citizens".

In the future, Kelly and Tobias are looking to use Monsido to focus their efforts on addressing more accessibility issues. Also, the City of Centennial currently uses the complementary Monsido PageAssist™ toolbar to give visitors the option to personalize aspects of the website, including font size and colors - which can be especially beneficial for people with visual impairments, such as older Americans.