City Council has approved a six-year contract, valued at up to $5.55 million, for the redesign of the city’s website, AustinTexas.gov. The contract, awarded to TW Lrw Holdings LLC, doing business as Material Holdings LLC, has an initial three-year term for $3.52 million, with three optional one-year extensions each valued at $676,698.
City staff told Council the redesign will replace the existing website with a modern, scalable system designed to enhance usability, accessibility and overall performance. The current website draws nearly 24 million visitors annually.
The site has faced limitations in meeting growing user demands and supporting complex interactions across its more than 9,000 published pages remaining after a recent push to retire approximately 6,000 pages that were found to be outdated or of little use for visitors.
Chief Information Officer Kerrica Laake said the current city website struggles to meet the needs of residents and other visitors seeking information about the multitude of services and functions provided by the city, as well as stronger integration with its related enterprise entities such as Austin Energy and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
“We’ve outgrown our traditional content management platform that we use for managing traditional websites. … The new contract will allow for a digital experience platform that focuses on helping us deliver those meaningful digital experiences designed for and around the Austin community,” she said.
Material Holdings LLC was selected from 14 proposals through a competitive bidding process. Key deliverables include tools for easy access across 52 city departments, and a comprehensive road map with defined milestones and metrics.
Jessica King, the city’s communications director, said the evaluation process identified the vendor’s experience with large and complex clients in the public and private sectors as a clear strength.
“We share (Council’s) goals for our website: a user-friendly experience that doesn’t require our residents to know how to navigate our complex organization in order to navigate the website and get the information they need to conduct business or advocate for themselves,” she said, noting the new website is expected to be delivered within two years. “First navigation of the site is challenging for a lot of people who don’t understand how our organization is laid out. You should not have to go to the site and say, ‘I need a permit. I need to go to development services to get that permit.’”
King added that one of the most important objectives of the new site will be improving usability for people with disabilities or who speak any of the 14 languages recognized as having substantial usage in the Austin area.
Caleb Sanchez, digital services supervisor for the Public Information Office, said heat mapping campaigns and user surveys would be some of the tools used to measure use of the city’s current site and the new site to gauge the effectiveness of the redesign and launch.
Council Member Alison Alter said a goal of the new site should be to make it as streamlined and intuitive as possible to enable more discovery of city programs by visitors to relevant areas and service pages.
“We have an item on our agenda (today) with respect to water conservation … and we have a whole lot of programs and no one’s using them,” she said. “I have to wonder if they’re not using them because they don’t know about them and they don’t have a road in to using them. I hope that by the time you’re done with this process, that it’s going to be really easy for people to find that and figure out what they need at a language level that they can relate to.”
The Austin Monitor’s work is made possible by donations from the community. Though our reporting covers donors from time to time, we are careful to keep business and editorial efforts separate while maintaining transparency. A complete list of donors is available here, and our code of ethics is explained here. This story has been changed since publication to clarify that the 24 million visitors may not be unique and that the airport and Austin Energy sites will not be part of the redesign.
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